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Tue, 14 Aug 2018 20:40:18 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8Hammer Vol. 3 – Blood and Terrorhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/KzbYoCY9wnE/
https://trailersfromhell.com/hammer-vol-3-blood-and-terror/#respondTue, 14 Aug 2018 15:06:17 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34623 Powerhouse Indicator continues its series of exotic attractions from the house of Hammer — productions that found new ways to shock audiences than tradition-breaking gore and violence. Two are war pictures with sharply contrasting themes, and the second pair constitute a popular-cinema referendum on racist colonial attitudes. Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror Blu-ray...

Powerhouse Indicator continues its series of exotic attractions from the house of Hammer — productions that found new ways to shock audiences than tradition-breaking gore and violence. Two are war pictures with sharply contrasting themes, and the second pair constitute a popular-cinema referendum on racist colonial attitudes.

It’s true — unless one is a full-on Hammer true believer that considers The Brigand of Kandahar and Creatures the World Forgot to be timeless classics, delving into the lesser-known Hammer films can be a case of diminishing returns. But when the company got truly creative, either with a radical screenplay or a committed director — Terence Fisher, Val Guest, Joseph Losey — isolated masterpieces could result. The new Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror disc set is composed of (1) a genuine great war picture all but unknown in America, (2) a lurid exposé of war atrocities, (3) a frightening, fascinating tale of gruesome colonial crimes, and (4) a thoughtless and cheap ‘Yellow Peril’ melodrama that brings back attitudes that had been outdated for decades.

Powerhouse Indicator has found its niche among genre fans by providing quality extras from knowledgeable people that care enough to think about what the films are really saying. Each of these features is daring in a different way, and a couple of them confront subjects that that are still highly controversial.

By the middle of the 1950s the ‘how we won the war’ accolades to British valor (The Dam Busters) were beginning to thin out. The topic of Allied troops in Japanese P.O.W. camps was not a favorite, as any realistic depiction of conditions would be deemed be too grim for public consumption. The classic The Bridge on the River Kwai and the laudable King Rat cast ambiguous doubt on the glory and patriotism that invariably accompany traditional tales of warfare, but they also can’t convey the full measure of misery — their ‘starving’ prisoners just look too healthy and too well fed. Hammer’s horror successes taught them that times were changing, that sensational content could claim an advantage in the commercial marketplace. The Camp on Blood Island was conceived as an exposé of the kind of war crimes recounted almost exclusively in trashy tabloids. Camp’s key advertising image is as lurid as a cheap paperback cover: a horrid, subhuman ‘Jap’ prepares to decapitate a waiting British soldier. The movie is more restrained.

John Manchip White’s screenplay gathers together a number of true incidents, placing them all in the same P.O.W. camp, a Malaysian outpost called Blood Island. The news is that the war is almost over, and the brutality of the guards rises proportionately. Prisoners caught trying to escape are executed. When Colonel Lambert (André Morell) protests, the commandant vows to kill everyone if Japan is defeated. The prisoners risk their lives to keep the isolated camp from getting fresh news, while anxiety grows among the maltreated men, and the women prisoners in a camp not far away. The sadism escalates, as the prisoners prepare for a desperate last-chance revolt.

Today’s ‘sophisticated’ audiences will likely have difficulty getting beyond Blood Island’s use of using Anglo actors in yellowface, with crude effects makeup around their eyes. Not only are most of the captors not played by Asians, they are depicted as completely inhuman monsters. Marne Maitland jabbers out words in semi-Japanese, commandant Ronald Radd’s Japanese sounds like controlled belching, and a hilariously made-up Michael Ripper speaks pidgin English. But in terms of the mistreatment of prisoners, the film is accurate. In many Japanese commands, fanatic officers were as cruel to their own men as they were to their captives. WW2 thrillers continue to feature inhuman Nazi figures nearly eighty years after the war, but the negative depiction of Japanese war criminals has been much less frequent.

The advertising for Blood Island surely revulsed viewers that thought war atrocities were not fit content for fiction filmmaking — and quite a few actual survivors of the camps felt the same way. Val Guest’s well-directed film takes the issue seriously within an obvious exploitation framework. The show suggests most of the carnage, and none of the slayings are graphic. The show’s exciting storyline — escape is impossible, so survival depends on keeping the Japanese uninformed — pays off with a disastrous but uplifting battle of the kind that never happened in real life. The prisoners have ‘magic’ grenades, which when thrown from a distance from which only a big league pitcher could score, explode just at the right moment. Occupation tribunals later convicted many war criminals, but even the Japanese complained that some major offenders used their rank to escape indictment, and returned to prosper in Japan’s later economic recovery. See my review of Masaki Kobayashi’s The Thick-Walled Room.

Compared to an all-time masterpiece like Kobayashi’s The Human Condition, Blood Island is a cheap War Horror Comic. An excellent 1956 version of Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice also finds a good path through the problem, but its romantic framework can’t fully express the barbaric hopelessness of life in a Japanese P.O.W. camp.

The great Val Guest almost overcomes the tawdry approach, with smart scenes, good acting, and a production that almost convinces us that locations in the English countryside are in Malaya — that overused gravel pit shows up, along with one effective matte painting.

The versatile Hammer stalwart André Morell is a fine ranking officer, while almost everyone gets standout parts — Barbara Shelley, Michael Goodliffe, Michael Gwynne, Phil Brown. Carl Möhner of Rififi and Sink the Bismarck! is a Dutch prisoner. Richard Wordsworth (The Quatermass Xperiment) has a gaunt appearance that expresses the truth of starvation in the camps.

The extras in video and text illuminate the problem of Blood Island — should Hammer be proud of its box office success? Is it a legit expression of wartime truths some people would rather not see, or a trashy incursion of Hammer Horror into the war film genre? A rather exploitative author is the story source, but we’re told that every war crime depicted actually happened — the cruelty of the Japanese office corps is well documented.

The featurettes and interviews examine the wide range of public and official reactions to the picture, from condemnation to faint praise. But nobody in 1958 was concerned about the portrayal of Asians by Anglos in grotesque make-up, a filmic given. The yellowface tradition has perpetrated negative images, but the real damage has been done by books and films that consistently portrayed Asians as subhuman devils.

Perhaps to counter the general ‘boys club’ image of horror fandom, PI uses more female spokespeople in this boxed set, who are variously credentialed and experienced. The ‘Women of Hammer’ extra on this disc features Kat Ellinger profiling actress Mary Merrall. In Blood Island she plays a prisoner who helps communicate with the men’s camp in code, by speaking in Latin.

Everyone has heard the argument that no war film can be ‘anti-war,’ because spectacular combat and heroic braveries under pressure have always been sure-fire dramatic material. War movies have examined bravery, cowardice, honor, duty, and the pressure of command. Even when pointing out the waste of lives, the injustice and the innumerable tragedies involved, the subject fascinates: war and combat presents a defining situation against which men can be tested.

Hammer and Val Guest’s follow-up to Camp on Blood Island comes from a noted TV play. In the average ‘lost patrol’ combat movie, brave soldiers penetrate enemy territory and sacrifice themselves as necessary to achieve the mission. They kill enemy soldiers but in general are welcomed by the locals, as ‘our’ forces are always better liked than those of the enemy. In the movies, patrols tend to be successful, even if not every soldier comes back alive.

Yesterday’s Enemy puts things in a completely different perspective, that can be overwhelmingly depressing. It’s still a play in which various patrol members debate the logic and morality of various actions, but it doesn’t subscribe to the traditional ‘Good Housekeeping’ rules of movie warfare. When men are hot and exhausted and convinced that their lives are in danger, all bets are off. The cynical sentiment expressed in Apocalypse Now takes effect: “Charging men with murder over here is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianpolis 500.”

A patrol in Burma is cut off in swampy enemy territory. Japanese patrols have already contacted the natives. Captain Langford (Stanley Baker) takes a small village away from some Japanese guards, and finds a map. When not of the locals will explain the map, Langford eventually resorts to executions, to force cooperation. Some patrol members are very disturbed by what Langford considers a tactical necessity. The map is an enemy plan to encircle a large group of Allied forces. Langford decides that the patrol can’t simply race to inform their superiors, but must instead stay in place and behave as if they haven’t learned anything. He dispatches three men to deliver the message, but everything goes wrong. His patrol is eventually captured and brought back to the same village. The Japanese Major Yamazaki (Philip Ahn) makes the same demand of Langford that Langford did to the locals: talk or die. Yamakazi will start killing Langford’s men until he capitulates.

Yesterday’s Enemy confronts the absurd cruelty of decisions made in combat. The title itself asks us to remember the fact that all too often ‘yesterday’s enemy is today’s friend.’ The more moralistic among the Brits, including the chaplain, are appalled by Langford’s ruthless, perhaps murderous actions. Is Langford a war criminal? The irony comes home to roost when, because of his actions, Langford cannot negotiate with the Japanese commander on a moral basis: the patrol is guilty of crimes usually ascribed only to the ‘savage’ Japanese. Langford killed for the sake of expediency, and the Burmese locals are surely not going to take his side against the Japanese.

Yesterday’s Enemy can be a traumatic experience for viewers convinced that they’re owed happy endings. American audiences have consistently rejected war movies that show defeat in any form — Tora! Tora! Tora! being a good example. Only ‘glorious martyrdoms’ qualify: Wake Island, The Alamo — and to make them glorious, filmmakers often distort historical events. The ‘horror’ of Val Guest’s show is a soldier’s worst nightmare. Captain Langford’s patrol faces not only death, but the possibility of obliteration. No-one may ever know what happened to them: No grave, no honors, no parade.

The show is cast with impressive talent. The great Stanley Baker often specialized in tarnished criminals and cruel lovers. The patrol’s ‘Padre’ Guy Rolfe (the star of this collection’s The Stranglers of Bombay) is not the kind that plagues his commander with Bible quotes, but simply a witness who tries to stand up for basic decency. Patrol members include the marvelous Leo McKern (Day the Earth Caught Fire), Gordon Jackson (The Great Escape), David Oxley (The Hound of the Baskervilles), Richard Pasco (The Gorgon), Percy Herbert (One Million Years B.C.) and future director Bryan Forbes (Quatermass 2). The talky script zeroes in on the basic absurdity of modern warfare, which now begins with atrocities and the killing of innocents. Captain Langford’s only crime is being efficient and wanting very badly to WIN, to prevail. His situation is a ‘cold equation’ in which many would say there is no correct thing to do. If captured, the patrol might be tortured and killed for any number of reasons. Langford’s actions put him at a terrible disadvantage with the Japanese Major, whose code of conduct has a different moral foundation.

Director Val Guest was always looking for something different in film subjects; he steers this ‘bad news’ war film away from melodramatic extremes. The show has no emotional veneer of soundtrack music to guide our feelings one way or another, offering disapproval here and sympathy elsewhere. The film takes place on interior jungle sets, often waist-deep in water. The usual pitfalls of such fakery are avoided by excellent set design, very good lighting and direction that restricts what we see. The anamorphic Megascope framing gives us just enough spacial context to avoid total claustrophobia. Unlike Guest’s Blood Island there are no specific graphic horrors to contemplate, just the evil that men do. Armies are no different than any other association of men with weapons, under stress. Men will kill for necessity, but also for expediency’s sake and sometimes just out of convenience.

The Val Guest audio interviews help us to understand Yesterday’s Enemy, which in England invited considerable critical controversy yet remains all but unknown in the United States. Hammer solicited the opinion of veteran officers for its initial press handouts, one of which is reproduced in the illustrated booklet. We also get excerpts from the novelization.

The ‘Women of Hammer’ extra this time around highlights the uncredited Edwina Caroll, who is best known as the zero-gravity Pan Am stewardess in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This new disc presentation of the notorious historical horror thriller The Stranglers of Bombay, is reviewed separately by Glenn Erickson at Cinesavant, at this link. Another highly recommended treatment of this same subject is 1988’s The Deceivers, produced by Merchant-Ivory and starring Pierce Brosnan.

1960’s The Terror of the Tongs is Hammer’s attempt at a Fu Manchu- like story, centering on a 1910 Chinese gang called The Dragon Tong and its gangster kingpin in Hong Kong. The great Christopher Lee is Chung King, wearing eye makeup that makes his eyelids begin halfway down his nose. Filmed in bright color and directed by Laurence Olivier associate Anthony Bushell, Tongs is a silly, racist tale that would seem to be an allegory for Communist subversion. Working for evil Tong leaders in Mainland China, Chung King wants to keep anti-Tong, pro-Brit Chinese merchants from learning more about his organization, which steals cargoes, extorts money from businesses and controls the slave trade.

The Tong also imports opium to Hong Kong, an evil that the film forgets was commenced by the British fifty years before as a means of pacifying the natives. The Tong assassins murder Chung King’s enemies with hatchets while ‘hopped up’ on the narcotic — a laughable misreading of the effects of opiates. After killing anti-Tong agent Mr. Ming (Burt Kwouk, The Pink Panther’s Cato) Chung King’s goons inadvertently murder the daughter of sea captain Jackson Sale (Geoffrey Toone). They then spend the rest of the movie fumbling the relatively simple job of silencing Sale as well. One Tong agent dispatched to kill Sale, instead blabs every detail about the Tong’s activities. The strongest scene sees Chung King instruct his brutish torturer (Milton Reid) to stick needles into Sale’s chest: “Tell me – have you ever had your bones scraped?”

Yvonne Monlaur, the star of the same year’s The Brides of Dracula looks darn good as Miss Lee. Decked out in China Doll garb, her tight dress is slit almost to the waist. Monlaur’s French accent is so strong, when she laments that there is no city in the world where she would fit in, we immediately think, Paris! Lazy screenwriter Jimmy Sangster frequently demonstrates his unenlightened, Sax Rohmer attitude. Miss Lee tells Captain Sale that Occidentals are foolish to think that Orientals will ever be civilized. Then she tells him for the umpteenth time that her only desire is to stay with him and ‘take care of him.’ By the way, those tight silk dresses Monlaur wears come in red, green and purple. Every possible Asian slur is here, undiluted.

The unforgettable (yet still un-billed) Milton Reid is Chung King’s most agreeably sadistic henchman. We recognized Reid’s one-of-a-kind face in 55 Days at Peking and Dr. No, where he did not receive credit either. Good actor Charles Lloyd Pack has fun playing make-believe as a murderous Tong doctor, and Marne Maitland is back as a ragged dockside beggar who appears to suffer from a skin disease — his face is crumbling away.

Tongs has always been something of a disappointment — the script generates little excitement, Anthony Bushell’s direction is dull, and many sets look cobbled from the bargain bin at Pier One Imports. The same multicolored bead screens hang in several different sets. Even the lighting is flat and ugly. Geoffrey Toone is an unappealing hero for a Yellow Peril tale; his Captain Sale solves problems with his fists, taking care not to dislodge the heavy makeup on the Anglo actors. The movie mishandles unpleasant scenes (the death of Sale’s daughter) and makes others inadvertently funny, as when Mr. Ming’s bullets fail to stop a charging Tong assassin. Ming just stands there and lets the man bury a hatchet in his chest.

In a preview of his series of Fu Manchu movies, Christopher Lee is appropriately grave but does little but sit and mumble threats in a vague monotone. The favorite Hammer actor may be the sole good reason to see the picture, even if the production fails to give his fanciful Chung King an aura of mystery. Anyone looking to score points about racist attitudes in film will find a wealth of offensive examples — the picture displays its demeaning stereotypes proudly. Whereas the wild card writer David Zelag Goodman layered The Stranglers of Bombay with shades of political complexity, The Terror of the Tongs’ Jimmy Sangster doesn’t have much to contribute.

Powerhouse Indicator’s Blu-ray of Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror is a fine presentation of these often-overlooked thrillers. All are in extremely fine shape. Fans that have seen earlier DVD releases will be impressed by the extra detail of the images and the enhanced clarity of the soundtracks. The Stranglers of Bombay can be viewed in three alternate versions — one censored for England, another censored for America, and a third copy that includes all the material from both versions.

I didn’t touch on all the extras, which are listed below. Each disc comes in its own separate keep case, with its own booklet; collectors that want to file war movies separately from horror pictures will be pleased. I only ran across one quizzical error that showed production haste: a mention of Val Guest’s The Abominable Snowman is illustrated with a still from Toho’s Half Human. Oops.

Hopefully Powerhouse Indicator’s example will lead other studios that hold rights to Hammer titles (Warners’ especially) to release them in similar quality editions, or to license them out to companies willing to do so. This set offers curious fans a wealth of information about these coveted productions. We’re hoping that the next collection of Columbia titles will bring us the culmination of Hammer’s B&W science fiction efforts, Joseph Losey’s These are the Damned. It was severely cut and its release was spread out across three years; it’s production history is loaded with unanswered questions.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Hammer Volume 3 Blood and TerrorBlu-rayrates:
Movies: Blood: Very Good, Enemy: Excellent, Stranglers: Excellent, Tongs: Fair
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements (from Indicator): New documentaries with Jonathan Rigby and Dr Josephine Botting, produced and directed by Marcus Hearn; The Stranglers of Bombay audio commentary with screenwriter David Zelag Goodman; The Terror of the Tongs audio commentary with screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, assistant editor Chris Barnes, and Marcus Hearn; The Guardian Interview with Val Guest (2005): archival audio recording with director Guest and Jonathan Rigby at London’s National Film Theatre; interviews with actors Barbara Brown (The Terror of the Tongs) and Edwina Carroll (Yesterday’s Enemy), props master Peter Allchorne (The Terror of the Tongs) and assistant costume designer Yvonne Blake (The Terror of the Tongs); The Stranglers of Bombay and the Censor (2018): ex-BBFC examiner Richard Falcon discusses the film’s history with the Board; David Huckvale on James Bernard (2018): an appreciation of the renowned composer, Steve Chibnall on Val Guest (2018): a new appreciation of the director, Hammer’s Women (2018): a series of new appreciations of the female players from the films: Mary Merrall, Edwina Carroll, Jan Holden and Yvonne Monlaur; Original theatrical trailers; The Stranglers of Bombay ‘Trailers from Hell’ commentary with Brian Trenchard-Smith (2013), Image Galleries; Illustrated booklets with new essays by Kim Newman, Neil Mitchell, James Oliver and Samm Deighan, archival materials, contemporary reviews, and film credits.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: August 11, 2018(5794hamm)

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/hammer-vol-3-blood-and-terror/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/hammer-vol-3-blood-and-terror/Memories of Underdevelopmenthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/ZqhRGBRD1wI/
https://trailersfromhell.com/memories-of-underdevelopment/#respondTue, 14 Aug 2018 14:57:51 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34622 Perhaps the top cinematic output of Cuban filmmaking is this investigation of a man that doesn’t embrace the revolution. Wishing to remain apolitical, the handsome Sergio prefers to pursue attractive women, as well as illusions of his own superiority. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s account of life with Castro doesn’t shirk from an honest view of...

Perhaps the top cinematic output of Cuban filmmaking is this investigation of a man that doesn’t embrace the revolution. Wishing to remain apolitical, the handsome Sergio prefers to pursue attractive women, as well as illusions of his own superiority. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s account of life with Castro doesn’t shirk from an honest view of conditions in the embargoed island, between The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Welcome to the revolution. Top Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s feature film Memories of Underdevelopment is so fascinatingly superior of a look at ‘the state of things’ in Cuba, that it evaded any official attempt to make it conform to Fidel Castro’s edict that all art wholly support La revolucíon. Set between the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Its source is a novel by Edmundo Desnoes that takes an intellectually ambiguous attitude toward the social changes made by Castro’s revolution.

Most surprisingly, the protagonist of Memorias de subdesarrolo has not embraced the new socialist regime. Castro Cuba’s ICAIC produced a range of films, but most pictures set in the present openly endorsed the new order. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s curious camera simply listens while its ‘undecided’ main character questions everything he sees. Thus the movie’s take on the New Cuba is open to interpretation. It’s also completely absorbing.

Filmed in expressive B&W, Memories deftly joins the past and present predicament of Sergio Carmona Mendoyo (Sergio Corrieri) through flashbacks, fantasy images, and first-person narration over views of city life and chosen documentary footage. Sergio is wealthy but newly isolated. His friends, his parents and his unhappy wife Laura (Beatriz Ponchova) have left for new lives in Miami; Sergio has stayed behind for a number of reasons that he realizes are selfish. He has no interest in working, preferring to live in indolent luxury, ‘like a European.’ He’s also a self-indulgent Don Juan, and he believes that he can have his pick of the Cuban women on the street that return his furtive, flirtatious glances. And he does have the excuse that his wife doesn’t want him to follow.

Sergio lives in the penthouse of a multi-story apartment building. It has been expropriated by the authorities so he no longer owns it, but the government has allowed him 13 years to keep collecting rent. Thus Sergio doesn’t work. He instead fancies himself as a possible writer. He once owned a furniture store but tired of business. Once alone, he amuses himself with the telescope on his balcony, goes through the fine things his wife has left behind. He fantasizes amorous scenarios with his attractive maid, Noemi (Eslinda Núñez) and recalls a sad early affair with Helen and his teenage experiences in brothels. The main story thread is Sergio’s relationship with the cute and flirtatious Elena Daisy Granados, a woman he picks up outside ICAIC. Daisy would like to be an actress; their playful encounter soon leads to bed, and Sergio giving her some of his wife’s clothes. But Sergio seems incapable of involvement with anything, even a lover. His thoughts criticize Elena in the same terms he dissed his wife, expressing the opinion that almost all Cuban women are as culturally underdeveloped as the country is economically. Elena doesn’t appreciate art the way Sergio expects, and he grows tired of her. He simply ditches her during a visit to Ernest Hemingway’s home, which is set up as a museum.

Three things impinge on Sergio’s peace of mind as he continues his intellectual isolation. Elena’s family takes him to court, charging him with rape; they’ve gotten Elena (who was only 16 when she met him) to misrepresent their affair. Sergio finds himself ‘the rich guy who doesn’t work’ opposed by ‘the people.’ Secondly, officials visit to question him about his living situation. It’s just a survey, but it worries him anyway: will these ‘commissars’ that have taken title to his property, seize it entirely and evict him? And last, Sergio worries that he may be blown to oblivion by a U.S. bomb. His friend Pablo (Omar Valdés) warned that Cuba might be caught in war between the Yankees and the Russians, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is about to begin.

Memories of Underdevelopment is a rich and rewarding picture that charms both sides of the political divide by examining the Cuban revolution from the viewpoint of an alienated bourgeois. Sergio Carmona at one point says that Havana doesn’t look as if it has changed, but the island has already been cut off from most American products. The big department store El Encanto has burned down and the stores are half empty. Considering himself an intellectual, Sergio buys books of philosophy and attends lectures, where we see the author Edmundo Desnoes and American playwright Jack Gelber take part in a debate. But Sergio places himself as an outsider, a slightly uncomfortable observer of a life others are living. He pores over his wife’s fancy possessions. He places a stocking over his face and distorting his features, as if trying to make his alienation visible. While mentally protesting his intellectual superiority, Sergio indulges sex fantasies in which he seduces Noemi and baptises her personally. An unreconstructed womanizer, he takes a completely selfish view of women. He summarizes his opinion with the statement that, ‘somewhere between 30 and 35, Cuban women just rot and become undesirable.’

Elena and Sergio’s affair is mutually consensual. He picks her up with a ‘piropo’ complimenting her knees, and she plays and toys with him as much as he flirts with her. We don’t immediately realize how young she is, although we should when she begins answering his questions with romantic lyrics from boleros. In typical playboy fashion Sergio soon finds fault with Elena, and he proves himself a total cad when ditching her. Apparently there is no provision for statutory rape in the law, yet it doesn’t seem wholly unjust when Sergio faces serious charges in court.

Director Gutiérrez Alea effortlessly communicates Sergio’s mental state through creative cinematics. Potent visuals recur, of his wife Laura’s contempt. Some flashbacks are presented in standard form, but one of Sergio’s arguments with Laura is heard on an audio tape that he recorded, and repeatedly plays back. It also shows what a thoughtless person he is, invading Laura’s privacy.

We see documentary clips of the Bay of Pigs invasion and other events, but instead of being presented as we’re used to seeing them *, they’re more background for Sergio’s critical comments. There is some play with individual images as well. A cartoon with a big question mark feeds into Sergio’s all-consuming insecurity. The visual button that finishes the apartment interview scene is a close-up of a graphic of a staring eye, over which we read, te estoy cazando. (I Am Hunting You.) In context, it expresses Sergio’s feeling of paranoia — like the Orwellian catchphrase about Big Brother Watching You.

At one point Alea cuts to a curious series of shots that we at first think are more of Sergio’s sexually charged memories — bits of nudity or sexual encounter repeat four or five times each, with repeating music. It turns out that Sergio is in a screening room introducing Elena to a filmmaker friend (Alea himself). Alea is screening a reel of film that some pre-Castro censor has built — bits of nudity snipped from release prints. Four copies of each deletion, presumably because Havana received four prints. I recognize but can’t place a topless dancer in one of the clips. As Sergio’s previous idle sex fantasies about Laura and Noemi are almost identical, a nice statement is made about male preoccupations being formed by sexy movies. Images of Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot appear as well: as Sergio’s opinion of Cuban women sours, his mind returns to the ‘developed’ sex symbols of Hollywood and Paris.

Sergio’s impressive first-person narration tells us that he doesn’t feel attached to anything, that he feels like a dead man. He also describes the ‘underdeveloped’ citizens around him as zombies. Over film of the captured Bay of Pigs combatants, Sergio notes that people hide in the anonymity of large groups, claiming to agree with the group’s goals. But when put on trial, the first thing the invaders do is claim that they are individuals not responsible for the aims of the group. The elitist intellectual Sergio has enjoyed the luxury of not having to choose sides. He has abstained from political commitment in the same way he’s sidestepped serious personal relationships. With armored convoys rolling on Havana’s waterfront highway and anti-aircraft guns being placed on the buildings around him, Sergio does not at all feel secure.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film is a modern masterpiece that uses New Wave technique better than the French do. It’s intensely Cuban. The fact that Havana is seen through the eyes of a wayward rake doesn’t discount his observations that plenty of Cubanas happily play the sexist courtship games on the street, and in the cafés and bookshops. Above that, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s vision at Havana is unlike that of Mikhail Kalatozov in Soy Cuba or even Carol Reed in Our Man from Havana: we’re in the streets among the people, not hanging around tourist sites. Lottery tickets are still being sold. Sergio finds fully-stocked bookstores, and buys a paperback of Lolita. A friend talks about the last American movie he saw, The Best of Everything. When Sergio passes a news stand, one display contains Spanish-language government publications with communist graphics and images of Che Guevara. But an ordinary standee is filled with trashy pulp pocketbooks — and the novelization of Forbidden Planet!

*The two or three political ICAIC short subject films I saw play like something concocted for Nineteen-Eighty Four: dynamic militaristic images of troops and armaments heralding the defense at Playa Girón, flashing images of Fidel, Lenin and Mao, drums on the soundtrack, and furious text graphics with slogans, or just provocative words. You’d think the films were concocted for mass rallies, with audiences expected to cheer and boo wildly on cue.

The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray of Memories of Underdevelopment is a fine 4K restoration of this marvelously entertaining picture, with its sexy romance between the spoiled landlord and the frisky young lady he picks up on a staircase. The excellent B&W image is properly framed and graded; I believe I tried to watch it once on PBS and that found the old subtitles were inadequate (as it is, the English subs for one statement by Edmundo Desnoes didn’t play on my machine). Some of the newsreel footage is scratched, as it always was, and a clip of Fidel Castro filmed from a TV screen is of course degraded.

Criterion’s disclaimers apologize for deficiencies in picture and audio that I did not notice. It’s all good.

Disc producer Kate Elmore lines up some fine extras (full list below). The author Desnoes appears in an interview, as do some critics to discuss the film. A long-form docu tells the entire career story of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and an interview with actress Daisy Granados gives us insights into the movie filming scene in the early years of the revolution. Before cast as Elena, Daisy turned down the role of Noemi over the nudity issue.

We know the barriers are problematic so we’re all the more pleased that Memories of Underdevelopment should appear in such a fine presentation; earlier DVD compilations of Cuban feature films haven’t fared as well. Is it too much hope to someday see Humberto Solás’ Lucía or Manuel Octavio Gómez’s La primera carga al machete (The First Charge of the Machete)?

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/memories-of-underdevelopment/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/memories-of-underdevelopment/Long Strange Triphttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/5_Pp2KwxCBI/
https://trailersfromhell.com/long-strange-trip/#respondMon, 13 Aug 2018 04:15:14 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34611At nearly four hours, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary about The Grateful Dead lasts as long as one of their typical shows. The movie, which veers between live performances and studio sessions, is a deep dive in the band’s mythology but manages to intrigue even those who dislike the free-floating vibe of Jerry Garcia’s never-ending jams.

]]>At nearly four hours, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary about The Grateful Dead lasts as long as one of their typical shows. The movie, which veers between live performances and studio sessions, is a deep dive in the band’s mythology but manages to intrigue even those who dislike the free-floating vibe of Jerry Garcia’s never-ending jams.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/long-strange-trip/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/long-strange-trip/THE DESERT HEART OF CHARLEY VARRICKhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/SIbcvsGgQDQ/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-desert-heart-of-charley-varrick/#respondSat, 11 Aug 2018 15:09:45 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34597Had I not recently revisited Don Siegel’s dusty, nail-hard crime thriller Charley Varrick, in fact just the night before seeing Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, it stands to reason that I probably would not have found myself thinking about the Walter Matthau-starring crime thriller midway through the Taiwanese director’s film. After all, Siegel’s tale of morally...

]]>Had I not recently revisited Don Siegel’s dusty, nail-hard crime thriller Charley Varrick, in fact just the night before seeing Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, it stands to reason that I probably would not have found myself thinking about the Walter Matthau-starring crime thriller midway through the Taiwanese director’s film. After all, Siegel’s tale of morally ambivalent “heroes,” scabrous, misanthropic villains, and the various levels of grime and corruption to be waded through and scraped off on the way toward accidentally absconding with three-quarters of a million dollars in laundered mob money would seem to have little in common with Hou’s deliberately paced, exquisitely mounted collection of three love stories, each from a different time, each told in a manner most rewardingly compared to the elliptical style of a short story on the page. And yet, as the first episode of Three Times, “A Time of Love,” began to wrap itself around me, rich in the atmospheric imagery of muggy, rain-soaked days, thick with romantic longing in every image of roadside signs and empty streets and hushed pool parlors alive only with the sounds of clacking balls, I began to marvel at how effortlessly Hou had created such a tactile, living landscape through which his two characters are allowed to move and breathe and touch and feel.

That feeling led me to ponder other instances in which a director has so casually, yet so effectively rendered locations in such a manner that they almost feel like they could be breathed in through the lungs, locations reflective of the mood of a given piece and even the rocky, unforgiving landscape that makes up the characters themselves.

Thanks to that lucky proximity of having seen it 24 hours earlier, Charley Varrick leapt to mind as a prime example. When it was released in 1973 by Universal, few seemed eager to pronounce claims of artistic integrity for what was perceived as an efficient, brutal crime programmer, no more, no less. But seen 45 years later its sturdy, intelligent design couldn’t be more apparent. As a vehicle for Walter Matthau, who would continue the dismantling of his status as strictly a comic actor begun here in films like The Laughing Policeman and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, it’s an excellent showcase for the star’s ability to project the electrical charges crackling behind his hangdog personage, as Varrick attempts to wiggle out from underneath the greasy, bloody thumb of an increasingly angry and impatient crime syndicate, personified by Joe Don Baker’s grinning hit man and John Vernon’s frighteningly insinuating big boss. And because of Don Siegel’s unblinking camera eye, his sense of graphic continuity, and his insistence that the places where the chase for Charley play out are just as important for the mood that can be drawn out of them naturally, from their simple existence as landscape, as they are in conveying the ineffable sense of the existential net closing in around him, Charley Varrick’s shadow is a long one, particularly for a movie that is only now beginning to be considered with the deference to classic status that certainly I think it deserves. Most modern noir efforts tend to be too flashy and self-conscious by at least half, but efforts like Brian Helgeland’s Payback and Harold Ramis’s The Ice Harvest, and more recently punchy, unpretentious pictures like Hotel Artemis,John Wick 2 and Scott Frank’s A Walk Among the Tombstones, have reached back through the smoke and wreckage of American action film history toward films like Charley Varrick, and in doing so work to stave off the creative dead-end the form seems to have been mired during since the advent of AVID-enable overediting and general CGI blockbuster-it is. Waiting within that long shadow, for filmmakers with a desire to tread this unforgiving, gravelly road, is the calloused embrace of Siegel’s cold shot to the heart, a movie in which their own curdled spirits are surely rooted.

Each time I see Charley Varrick, the crucial importance of its locations to the realization of the bleak comedy and arid cynicism of the movie’s moral ambiguities hit home particularly hard. The template of the movie is set by Siegel’s attention to the details surrounding the bloody holdup that kicks the movie off, staged within the simple, brick construct of the Las Cruces, New Mexico bank, and outside that bank, along the dusty side streets of the town where children play in the unyielding sun and run for cover once the bullets start to fly. Outside that bank, the heat is palpable within the car that Charley sits and waits outside the bank, along with his partner Harman (Andy Robinson) and their getaway driver, Charley’s wife Nadine (Jacqueline Scott), even as they sit shaded by the trees draped around the bank’s front entrance. A bloody shootout ensues, Varrick’s gang directly responsible for the deaths of at least two officers of the law, and they hit the road to attempt an escape. (If there were any action sequence that could prove just how different the ‘70s were in terms of what filmmakers often expected of audiences in terms of moral adjustments to their sympathies, this would have to be one.)

In the aftermath of the getaway chase, which will result in Nadine’s death, Charley and Harman desert the car and don the gear of Charley’s legitimate business— white crop-duster overalls—and make off in Charley’s van, which bears the legend, “Charley Varrick, Last of the Independents.” But they’re stopped by a state trooper on his way to assist in the already-finished chase, and Siegel uses the moment to not only create suspense as to whether Charley and Harman will be recognized (and perhaps kill this poor bastard too), but also to allow us some breathing space after that intense chase, space that we can use to again breathe in the harsh, tactile, literally roadside ambience. I swear I could almost feel the gravel crunching under my feet and the hot air running across my face in this scene. The feel of sagebrush and dust and the foreboding and oppressiveness built into these wide-open spaces is highlighted, subtly, in this sequence, and its methods are carried through the entire film, whether the movie is “luxuriating” in the specifics of Charley’s trailer-park hideaway, a cathouse where Baker chastely spends the night as he moves in for the kill, the stuffy, under-lit interior of a photographer’s shop run by the late Sheree North, who invests an insinuating sexuality into casual betrayal, or in fascinating found-documentary glimpses of the rundown south end of South Virginia Street (specifically, the immediate area surrounding Fitzpatrick’s Casino) in Reno, Nevada, a city which seems forever tied to the seedy vitality in evidence there when this film was shot in 1972.

In Charley Varrick, the prickly, dusty landscape and its ambience of indifference is inescapably tied to the film’s crisp visual sense, its terse rhythms and its unforgiving and illuminating approach to character and storytelling. Though championed by some sympathetic reviewers in 1973, the prevailing wind at the time suggested that it was most just another unusually brutal sausage from the Universal factory. Yet seen now, it seems undeniable that Don Siegel’s movie is a model of efficiency and expressiveness, especially after the spectacle of witnessing 45 years of less-talented directors thrashing at the hide, and eventually the skeletal frame, of the modern action film, where money and excess and blind demographic pursuits have yielded fewer and fewer artistic returns. Charley Varrick, surely a masterpiece of sun-bleached, Technicolor film noir, has the desert, its prickliness, its fever, its dusty insistence, in its blood and its soul, and the chill of the nighttime shadow of its influence and its reputation is only likely to grow longer, deeper, more resonant as each year passes, and as each new hotshot director tries to outdo the kind of terse, economical style in which its playfully perverse and formally profound pleasures are rooted.

Deep Rising must be the most commercially calculated production of 1998. We can hear the pitch now: it’s Titanic crossed with Aliens crossed with Die Hard: constant action, gore and spectacle with scary monsters. Shamelessly exploitative, the highly polished show gives casual blood ‘n’ gunfire fans exactly what they want, without pause for even the slightest scene that might suggest that the show has a reason to be. The description just above is all the reason the show needs. It’s a total action machine, the kind of guaranteed crowd pleaser where not a minute goes by without an axe cleaving a head or someone being dragged to some god-awful bloody death.

It certainly has energy, starting with Jerry Goldsmith’s driving music score. The characters are one-dimensional but each is well cast and played with total conviction. Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Kevin J. O’Connor, Wes Studi and Djimon Hounsou give it their all, although I doubt any of them have saved Deep Rising a prominent place on a résumé.

The millionaire guests aboard the cruise ship SS. Argonautica in the South China Sea celebrate as if it were New Year’s Eve in The Poseidon Adventure. Speeding toward them is a renegade motor patrol boat captained by John Finnegan (Treat Williams), whose motto is that he asks no questions if the money is good. John and his mechanic Joey Pantucci (Kevin J. O’Connor) are not happy to discover that their clients are vicious mercenaries, and their cargo boxes of high-tech torpedoes. The mercenary leader Hanover (Wes Studi) has a confederate on board the Argonautica, who disables the ship’s systems on cue, leaving it dead in the water. But something else is very seriously awry: when the pirates from the patrol boat finally board the giant ship, they find nobody alive, just blood and shredded human remains. As they raid the ship’s vault, a few survivors do turn up: the Captain (Derrick O’Connor), the owner (Anthony Heald) and a sexy jewel thief, Trillian St. James (Famke Janssen). But the ship is still infested with horrible ‘things’ that kill with alarming speed. Even with their fancy guns, the high-seas pirates are no match for the monsters — will anyone survive?

Glossy, disposable action films of all kinds were Big $ Bucks in 1998; the director Michael Bay could seemingly do no wrong, no matter how stupid the project. Director Stephen Sommers would soon make several successful but awful Mummy movies and spin-offs, and then become bogged down in a false start on a Universal Monster Franchise. Here Sommers concentrates on the kind of non-stop excitement that translates to every action audience from Hong Kong to Timbuktu. The attractive and well made show features excellent, expensive visual effects (for 1998), plus monsters and gore effects designed by Rob Bottin, the past master of the remake of The Thing. There’s no denying that Deep Rising is an efficient thrill machine. The action is mostly good and the characters fun — the only truly dumb aspects are a couple of action climaxes and some witless dialogue now and then.

What do the thrill fans get for their money? A lot of gross-out action that will seem awfully familiar. Various soldiers with fancy machine guns (the kind that never need reloading) split up to wander alone through the wrecked cruise ship’s creepy corridors, a la the template horrorshow Alien. A woman is apparently sucked down a toilet, an ‘Eeek – ha ha’ moment reminiscent of the remake of The Blob. A half-digested victim stands and tries to talk, yielding a part-CGI equivalent of Rob Bottin’s earlier gore spectacles. Forty years before, the hero of the classic Quatermass 2 saw blood dripping from a duct, and exclaimed “That pipe is blocked with human pulp!” Fans disappointed that the human pulp wasn’t seen will now get their fill in Deep Rising, when an entire wrecked ballroom is discovered to be littered with mangled human remains — ‘this luxury liner is wallpapered with human pulp!’

The graphic mutilation of human bodies (plus plenty of expletives) earn the movie a hard ‘R’ rating. In Sommers’ The Mummy of the next year, the same kind of gore effects got a PG-13, because the desiccated bogeymen were made of dust and little or no blood was involved. Thus little kids could be thrilled by people with holes through their bodies, etc., being chopped to pieces or blown to flinders.

Especially fun is Anthony Heald as the ship’s fat cat owner, the sniveling capitalist that’s been the too-easy fallback villain since at least RoboCop. Heald’s broad overplaying was almost too much for The Silence of the Lambs but his exaggeration perfectly suits the action here, which is basically a ’30s action serial with ’80s brutality and ’90s CGI effects.

The monster of Deep Rising is one of the more unmotivated menaces in monster movie history. Tell me again why it chooses to make its appearance right in the middle of the crime of the century? (This of course has been a common occurrence dating back to Beast from Haunted Cave). It’s a writhing mass of squid tentacles, with H.R. Giger- like multiple mouths at each tentacle tip, and a redundant, very non-Squiddish mouth up top as well. Everyone thinks they’re fighting many individual monsters, when each of dozens of tentacles can snake its way throughout the ship’s dozens of passages. When unseen, the monster pulls off all kinds of scary tricks. Excellent effects show metal walls and bulkheads being dented and deformed by the powerful monster flesh. We don’t have enough time to wonder why a creature that has eliminated thousands of passengers in less than an hour, can’t manage to gobble up eight individuals. But that’s a question of logic, and we all know that pursuing logic in this kind of show is madness. Madness, I tell you.

Stephen Sommers wrote the film as well. His dialogue is often sharp and to the point, but it’s also laced with generic groaners, that unnecessarily remind us that we’re watching multi-million dollar trash:

“It’s like, everyone just vanished.”

“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this!”

“I owe you one.”

“Are we talking about some kind a mutated sea monsters here?”

“Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”

“We’ve got to get out of here! This thing’s going to blow!”

After all the classy effects and genuinely good scares, the story gives us a cartoonish finish, with people escaping on a Jet Ski that can outrun fireball explosions, a torpedo rigged for ramming as in The African Queen, and a ship that blows up as if every deck was cast from plastic explosive. Just when the finale does something decent — allowing a favorite character live — it opts for a lame ‘here we go again’ cliffhanger story button.

Movies like this wiped out the market for cheaply made action, horror and sci-fi pictures, the kind that once allowed unconnected outsider talent a path to a moviemaking career. ‘Cheap’ is direct-to-video slop like the Sharknado series. There are some exceptional foreign-made monster pix with original ideas, such as Joon-ho Bong’s The Host. The thrilling Attack the Block has more humor and feeling, and less gore. Both have story frameworks that are basically humanist. I would have to say that Deep Rising is more competent and less frustrating than similar claustrophobic monster rallies, like Leviathan, Event Horizon and Deepstar Six. All have settings that could be transposed from the ocean to outer space, or vice-versa. Deep Rising has one nicely timed laugh with some elevator music, it must be admitted, and for my first viewing held my complete attention. But I keep forgetting to put a basket next to my TV monitor, to park my brain while watching. It’s just not needed.

The KL Studio ClassicsBlu-ray of Deep Rising is another one of Kino’s fully loaded special editions. The beautifully filmed show is certainly easy on the eyes, and the first-wave CGI effects are far better than what was seen in films just a couple of years earlier, like Species. Jerry Goldsmith’s score amplifies the film’s thrills with good action music and nice flourishes of jarring noise when those slimy monsters attack.

The list of extras analyzes Deep Rising as if it were the Movie of the Year; if you’re the kind of viewer that likes to pore over effects descriptions in magazines you’ll be in heaven. The personable director Stephen Sommers shares a commentary with his editor, Bob Ducsay. A section of filmmaker and technical interviews gets direct input from three of the actors, the famed cinematographer (here a second unit director) Dean Cundey, and a score of visual and makeup effects people. It’s a good way to see what was ‘real’ and what was digitally augmented. Some ILM visual demonstrations are included as well.

The cover art is reversible. I’m choosing the new Jacob Phillips art with the moody graphic of the ship menaced by cartoon tentacles. It’s a good fit.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/deep-rising/feed/6https://trailersfromhell.com/deep-rising/The Cat O’ Nine Tailshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/0aOnYSxclT4/
https://trailersfromhell.com/cat-o-nine-tails/#commentsFri, 10 Aug 2018 21:16:53 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34592 Dario Argento’s second murder whodunnit is less stylized but almost as enjoyable as his first, Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Reporter James Franciscus and blind ex-detective Karl Malden investigate killings at a fancy genetics institute, but everyone they interview turns up dead. Catherine Spaak is among the suspects in a crime spree with nine...

Dario Argento’s second murder whodunnit is less stylized but almost as enjoyable as his first, Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Reporter James Franciscus and blind ex-detective Karl Malden investigate killings at a fancy genetics institute, but everyone they interview turns up dead. Catherine Spaak is among the suspects in a crime spree with nine clues but no easy solution. Turin locations, a glossy widescreen image and Argento’s polished direction are the draw, along with some fine music cues by Ennio Morricone — who in 1971 scored 24 separate features!

Based strictly on fan appreciation, Dario Argento is probably the most popular EuroHorror director. Atypically for the genre, his films enjoyed wide theatrical releases in America, even if they were sometimes heavily abridged. Argento fully developed the ‘killing machine’ wing of giallo horror begun by Mario Bava, and his ’70s films are the slickest of the bunch. His second effort TheCat O’ Nine Tails is much more of a straight murder mystery than horror film, a more intricately plotted pot-boiler than his The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Minus a few seconds of rougher violence, it might almost be suitable for ’70s television.

A string of grisly murders around a research institute gets reporter Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) jugular-deep in trouble. Who is masterminding the killings, and why? Puzzle composer Franco Arnò (Karl Malden) is blind now, but was a detective when he had his sight. Are the clues he provides too good to be true? The daughter of the head of the institute (Catherine Spaak) soon becomes involved with Carlo. Could either be playing a role in the slayings?

Euro Horror is about style, and Dario Argento certainly initiated one of his own. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries he has the benefit of fine production values. The Cat O’ Nine Tails is beautifully photographed and has a fine Ennio Morricone score. Two name American stars top-line the cast. Argento would later earn the accolades of film critics by dropping the mechanical murder-mystery trappings of his ‘animal’ trilogy (Bird, Cat and Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and aiming for the purely macabre. He also dropped the strictures of a formal plotline. His later shows, especially Suspiria, are appropriately dreamlike and ‘delirious,’ even as they make less and less sense.

Cat has the structure of an ordinary murder mystery. Yes, the string of red herrings isn’t going to impress Agatha Christie fans. The killings are puzzling but the elements predictable, such as the photographer that is killed just before he can turn over crucial negatives. We get a sidebar trip to a gay bar and a jealous gay relationship that pads things out, just as does a very good car chase through Turin. The mystery photo that reveals a hand pushing a man in front of a train, puts the film on a momentary detour into Blow-Up territory. It’s actually a fairly stale formula: every time the camera cuts to a minor character doing something alone, we can pretty much tell that an unseen assailant will intervene. Argento uses a great deal of subjective camera from the killer’s POV. The formula is now so well established that a single cutaway to an unknown person’s subjective viewpoint person is that is needed to clue the audience that a murderer or voyeur is present.

Argento’s suspense style withholds information rather than provides it, making him another Hitchcock imitator who has little in common with the master. The frequent subjective shots of corridors being stalked show off some very polished camerawork, providing tense padding while concealing the identity of the killer. Classic Hitchcock subjective-objective technique alternates angles on the person doing the stalking, causing an identification effect. Argento’s cold ‘killer POV’ puts us in sort of a dream state, cruising in the dark for ‘our’ next victim. It has some psychological merit in that it mirrors the recollections of real killers in denial abou their personal agency in their crimes: “My role was passive. I didn’t do it, it just happened.”

The film has great appeal for fans of murder whodunnits. The Turin locations are attractive, but it is Argento and his craftsmen that select and create truly impressive interiors for the genetic institute and its owner’s home. Cool and sleek in tone, the ‘feel’ of this Argento evokes glossy Italian design and fashion magazines. The architecture of Cat isn’t as stylized as the glass cages in Bird with the Crystal Plumage, but it still supplies a lush, tactile presence not found in most U.S. studio pictures.

Cat also isn’t quite the string of violent setpieces one might expect from Argento. The Hardy Encyclopedia of Horror doesn’t even list this title. A slaying on a train platform has some jarring shock cuts of a body tumbling along the track, but from then on the killings become secondary to the assembly of a complex puzzle. They can get brutal, but there are no grotesque gimmicks, no giant jagged statuaries falling on people or witnesses trapped in glass cages. Argento downplays the gore in this feature, but it shows him at his least affected. Even the unwelcome subplot with a small girl threatened by a killer shows restraint.

The cast plays the story straight and serious. Can’t-get-arrested-in-Hollywood James Franciscus, a reasonable actor who soon drifted away from respectable parts, carries the film well and is definitely not slumming. The surprise is Oscar winner Karl Malden, also at a career low. Between classy Kazans and television security, he either took this job for the vacation in Italy, or perhaps because he was attracted to this quirky blind character Arnò. Malden doesn’t short-change the producer either — the show sets off in a good direction, showing Malden’s ex-detective Arnò creating crossword puzzles with an interesting set of braille building blocks. ‘I like solving puzzles’, he says, while we’re thinking that computers must have put a lot of puzzle makers out of business.

We remember Catherine Spaak well from her part opposite Rod Taylor in Richard Quine’s Hotel from a few years before. She’s also quite good in Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso. The rest of cast provide character turns in colorful parts (what seems to pass for narrative interest with screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti).

If you enjoy the Argento brand of terror, you’ll likely find the more restrained The Cat ‘O Nine Tails an excellent showcase for his basic directing skills. The title, by the way, is Carlo and Franco’s way of describing the nine clues they have, none of which they have solved. But the show will be catnip time for Argento-ites.

Arrow Video USA’s Blu-ray of The Cat O’ Nine Tails is a beautiful presentation. Arrow’s details tout a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative and the show comes with original Italian and English soundtracks and subtitles. Cat was severely cut for America and the theatrical print I saw around 1975 was not a thing of beauty. I’m sure that there have been many video releases in the interim, but I remember the old Anchor Bay discs from the early DVD boom, when the uncut sex and violence of slick Euro-horror was the rage among college kids. Sourced so close to the original negative, these new scans likely look much better than anything but an answer print right out of the lab. The usual Techniscope granularity is not in evidence. A couple of sources list the anamorphic ‘Cromoscope’ lens as well, but the visual field is very flat, as if a prime lens were in use… during pans, the screen does not ‘warp’ as with many anamorphic systems.

New interviews give us face time with the director, his writer, the production manager and Cinzia de Carolis, who plays the little girl Lori (very well). A new feature illustrates the script for an unused extended ending. The new artwork by Candice Trip is really attractive, and Arrow also supplies a reverse side with an original release illustration.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Cat O’ Nine TailsBlu-rayrates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent Italian and English
Supplements: New audio commentary by critics Alan Jones and Kim Newman; new interviews with co-writer/director Dario Argento, co-writer Dardano Sacchetti, actress Cinzia De Carolis and production manager Angelo Iacono; script pages for the lost original ending, translated into English for the first time; original Italian and international theatrical trailers; reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Candice Tripp.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English and Italian (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: August 9, 2018(5796cat)

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/cat-o-nine-tails/feed/3https://trailersfromhell.com/cat-o-nine-tails/Virushttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/B96gL8FOqCY/
https://trailersfromhell.com/virus/#commentsFri, 10 Aug 2018 04:00:37 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34584An amorphous mass of electrical energy is on an outer space prowl in John Bruno’s 1999 science-fiction thriller derived from the comic book of the same name. Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin and Donald Sutherland are just three of the unlucky crew members destined to fight off a squadron of robots possessed by the deep...

]]>An amorphous mass of electrical energy is on an outer space prowl in John Bruno’s 1999 science-fiction thriller derived from the comic book of the same name. Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin and Donald Sutherland are just three of the unlucky crew members destined to fight off a squadron of robots possessed by the deep space power grid.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/virus/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/virus/The Hospitalhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/BokjUIf3_2M/
https://trailersfromhell.com/hospital/#commentsWed, 08 Aug 2018 04:00:11 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=8046A pre-Network Paddy Chayefsky wrote this dark, trenchant medical satire, outrageous in its time, that now plays like a semi-documentary! George C. Scott and Diana Rigg are sensational. And beware The Paraclete of Kaborka!

]]>A pre-Network Paddy Chayefsky wrote this dark, trenchant medical satire, outrageous in its time, that now plays like a semi-documentary! George C. Scott and Diana Rigg are sensational. And beware The Paraclete of Kaborka!

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/hospital/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/hospital/It Happened Herehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/xb8DsmWmS5M/
https://trailersfromhell.com/it-happened-here/#commentsTue, 07 Aug 2018 17:42:43 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34570 Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo were teenagers when filming began on this superlative wartime thriller. Taking over eight years to complete, it imagines life in an England occupied by Nazi Germany and run by home-grown English collaborators. The film’s realism outdoes any big-studio picture — the period detail and military hardware are uncannily authentic....

Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo were teenagers when filming began on this superlative wartime thriller. Taking over eight years to complete, it imagines life in an England occupied by Nazi Germany and run by home-grown English collaborators. The film’s realism outdoes any big-studio picture — the period detail and military hardware are uncannily authentic. It also pushes the limit of the documentary form by using the ugly testimony of real English fascists in a fictional context. Mr. Brownlow opens up his behind-the-scenes film archive for this dual-format release.

All hail Kevin Brownlow, the dean of classic film restoration. Since the 1960s he has championed awareness of our silent film legacy. He’s been reviving lost or fragmented films ever since, most notably Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon. But he began in the middle 1950s, as a kid starting out with a movie camera gifted by his mother.

Once upon a time, a pair of teenaged English boys decided to make a 16mm war movie with soldiers and guns and lots of excitement. Seven years later the ‘amateur’ production was finally finished, but as a theatrical feature released by a major studio. Director Tony Richardson helped find financing to shoot sequences in 35mm; to provide the ‘youngsters’ with film stock, Stanley Kubrick donated short ends from Dr. Strangelove.

The amazing thing is that their film is one of the earliest and most mature examinations of the nature of Fascism. It’s a compelling argument against the notion of national exceptionalism: that any country or people are immune to political extremism. The title is surely half-borrowed from 1935 Sinclair Lewis book called It Can’t Happen Here. The social satire imagines a Fascist-corporate takeover of America. It’s not surprising that the book is back in print again.

Called It Happened Here, Brownlow and Mollo’s movie made the rounds of a few European film festivals in early 1965, where it gained a certain amount of notoriety. The story of an England defeated by Hitler and functioning under Nazi rule, it left some British critics confused and incensed. Some were offended by the film’s notion that the proud Brits that withstood the Battle of Britain would ever knuckle under to the Nazis, or collaborate with them as shown in the film. And many were made furious by what they perceived was a virulent pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic message. The real English Nazis in the film don’t just shout out the usual slogans. They instead are allowed to spout their ugly rhetoric, without being shot dead or immediately contradicted by stalwart patriotic voices, as was standard practice in war movies.

It Happened Here received boos from a German audience at the Mannheim Film Festival. American filmgoers were also more accustomed to a less direct handling of the ‘Nazi problem.’ Possibly because of the Cold War need to bolster West Germany, U.S. films were no longer presenting Germans in war films as despicable villains. In The Young Lions, young German Marlon Brando anguishes over his soul-rending moral dilemma.

Daily Variety called It Happened Here a science-fiction film, which is sort of what it is — a story of WW2 in the ‘negative subjunctive.’ That is, a tale of events which could have happened but did not happen, but if it did happen it might have happened like this. It’s actually an alternate reality story, a time-twisting concept not used much back then (in movies, anyway). Trashy books and movies in which ‘the Nazis won’ are now commonplace but there remains one classic, the visionary The Man in the High Castle by science fiction author Phillip K. Dick.

It Happened Here begins with the image of a map, like a dry instructional film. It takes as its springboard the simple idea that Hitler launched a full invasion during the Battle of Britain and quickly subdued England. Everything else follows with complete credibility.

The occupation of England is seen through the eyes of Pauline (Pauline Murray), a country nurse fleeing the fighting that has broken out between German occupation troops and resistance partisans. Using Ireland as a base, the Americans and ‘loyalist’ English guerillas are attempting to re-invade from the West. Pauline witnesses a massacre of civilians. Believing that the partisans are responsible, she decides like the majority of her countrymen that getting things back to normal is more important than patriotism.

“After all,” she sighs, “We did lose the war.”

Much of London has been bombed out. German military occupiers are everywhere, fraternizing with girls and reading optimistic war news from the Nazi publications on the newsstands. The English are split into two factions: a restless mob of unemployed, uncooperative have-nots and those that have chosen to collaborate with the New Order. To work and survive Pauline joins the National Socialist puppet political party called the Immediate Action Organization. The clerk that signs her up is coldly impersonal:

Pauline soon finds herself worked half to death training as a combat-ready ambulance nurse. Her Immediate Action uniform earns her the hatred of ordinary people in the street. The radio exclusively plays German marches and propaganda bulletins; as part of her party duties Pauline must attend indoctrination lectures extolling the glory of fascism, and torch-lit rallies and funerals where Nazi speakers stir up hatred and rage with Hitler-like tirades.

Pauline is tainted by association with a luckless pro-partisan Doctor Fletcher (Sebastian Shaw). Her harsh Immediate Action supervisors eventually exile her to the countryside, to work in a tiny clinic curiously free of oppressive party supervision. That’s as much of the spoiler-laden plot as is fit to reveal.

English audiences of 1966 accustomed to stiff-upper-lip propaganda were shocked by the film’s depiction of a conquered, largely collaborating English public. Democratic ideals and Churchill’s patriotic defiance have fallen by the wayside, as if they had been only bitter illusions. The conquering Germans have placed English fascists in positions of authority: the radio voices, the lecturers, the rabid Nazi propagandists are all English. A disturbingly convincing newsreel celebrates the wonders of National Socialism with the same confidence by which Britons were assured that ‘London Can Take It!’ during the Blitz. The newsreel reminds us that England had its own strong Fascist political faction before the war. Their leaders are now running the country for the Germans.

It Happened Here’s strength is in its details. The docu-like visualization of the war years is more convincing than that seen in big-budget studio pictures. It doesn’t look like a recreation, it looks Real. The uniforms, the paperwork, the posters on the buses, the patches on the sleeves, the ration cards all look 100% authentic. All this detail is what originally lifted the film from home-movie status.

Co-director Kevin Brownlow was a cutting assistant in films and already a cinema history expert. As a child he cobbled together a 9mm film reconstruction of Abel Gance’s Napoleon from pieces found in film libraries. His military-buff sidekick Andrew Mollo collected German uniforms and equipment at flea markets. The pair linked up with a London collector of Nazi arms and vehicles, all stored at his country farm. Begun (after many false starts) as an amateur film shot in two- or three-hour spurts on weekends with the help of friends that came and went, the project became an ordeal that went on for years. The filming sessions were full of last-minute improvisations. Brownlow’s writings reveal that he pulled German tourists off the London streets, and asked them to don SS uniforms.

The whole experience is documented in Kevin Brownlow’s book How it Happened Here. It’s difficult to imagine the gangly-looking Brownlow persuading London authorities to let him stage Nazi troopers marching on parade past city landmarks. Apparently fights broke out between the crew and street toughs — real Teddy Boys roughed up the filmmakers and stole their cameras.

That was nothing compared to the ordeal Brownlow and Mollo would be subjected to when the film was finished. Because It Happened Here maintains a documentary distance and refuses to moralize, some reviewers concluded that it condones some of the attitudes it depicts. Brownlow and Mollo recruited real English fascist hate-mongers to play the collaborating Immediate Action spokespeople, thereby giving the fictional film a ‘true’ documentary aspect. The main Nazi spokesman (an odious Frank Bennett) composed much of his own dialogue, and we can tell that he really believes it. Watching the moronic Hitler wanna-be venting his hatred for Bolsheviks and Jews, we realize just how commonplace and banal ideological evil can be. As the Nazis are observed without editorial comment, for six minutes the film becomes a valuable vérité document. The use of ‘real’ Nazi testimony in a fictitious context is a genuine cinematic innovation: Brownlow and Mollo must have been aware of experimental pictures like the French Chronicle of a Summer.

In terms of documentary theory, the self-appointed Nazi spokesman Frank Bennett can be compared to Shirley Clarke’s interview subject Jason Holiday in her experimental Portrait of Jason. Jason is a clever fellow who already ‘plays characters’ to get along in life, and for Clarke’s camera he skillfully confects a special character. Clarke’s film is an exposé of the facades people erect and the games they play, while Brownlow simply entices a bigot a to unguardedly spill his ugly ideas.

United Artists insisted on the deletion of this six- minute non-scripted discussion sequence, because of the controversy it had attracted in festival screenings. The complaint was that normal audiences would think the film an endorsement of Naziism. The exact same thing happened thirty years later with Starship Troopers, a fantasy that suggested that our society is developing into a Nazi-like aggression machine. A number of vocal critics didn’t see past the films violence: seeing the heroes dressed in Nazi-like uniforms, they misinterpreted and misrepresented its satiric message.

Perhaps that shows that the distributors that turned down It Happened Here were correct: the public at large is incapable of dealing with ideas more complex than Good Guys versus Bad Guys. Even the documentary-like Battle of Algiers chooses sides: it pretends to be neutral, yet its emotional argument is clearly in favor of the Algerian rebels. Brownlow and Mollo’s film non-judgmentally depicts an imperfect (collaborating, even) heroine and lets the politics fall where they will.

The ideological critics didn’t want Nazi ideas to be voiced in any media platform, period. They argued that nothing in the film directly refutes what the Nazis say. That’s not true: the Doctor Fletcher character tells Pauline to her face what’s wrong with the Nazis, and says that the tragedy is that the only way to get rid of Fascism is to use Fascist methods.

It Happened Here is by no means a straight political picture; it’s a fine film about the brutality of occupations and resistance fighting. It’s also a lesson in cinematic storytelling. The skill in the direction erases considerations of budget and the fact that the movie was shot piecemeal over a number of years. There’s nothing to apologize for. Without voiceover or too much expository dialog, we follow nurse Pauline’s every action and clearly understand her every reaction. It’s a model of great filmmaking by any definition.

Kevin Brownlow went on to become the dean of film historians. His wonderfully detailed interviews with silent-movie personalities, before the culture became interested in the subject, recorded the story of those years just in time, before the actual actors and filmmakers of the silent era passed away. He’s still active making documentaries.

Andrew Mollo’s knowledge of military history and costumes quickly earned him work as a technical consultant and costumer on big-budget movies. Peter Suschitzky, the cameraman who gave Brownlow’s film its Triumph of the Will– styled documentary look, later shot The Empire Strikes Back. And one of the film’s few professional actors, Sebastian Shaw, will have many fans wondering where they’ve seen him before. Look closely at Shaw’s eyes: he plays Anakin Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. He’s glimpsed only for a few seconds when his black Darth Vader helmet is removed.

The Bfi’s Region A+B Blu-ray + PAL DVD of It Happened Here is a dream revisiting of this once-obscure gem. A new scan brings the picture up to full resolution. The earlier scenes of the film are in 16mm, and it’s now easy to see where the jump is made to the larger 35mm format. Every image looks like an authentic shot from a WW2 newsreel or magazine layout. That this was accomplished on such a non-budget is incredible. It’s fun just to peruse the mind-boggling detail in the historical reconstruction.

The disc is listed as Region B only, but it played fine and normally in my domestic Region A player.

In his book Kevin Brownlow accounted for the original muffled audio by saying that United Artists did a bad job producing the optical soundtrack. The superior Blu-ray audio improves the track, but viewers unfamiliar with the accents will still want to access the Bfi’s English subtitles.

Fans and academics accustomed to Kevin Brownlow’s excellent talks on cinema, will find him twice as amusing when recalling his experience as an inexperienced teenaged filmmaker. We understand when he remembers his first movie ideas as insufferable and pretentious. He even confesses that much of his early work on the movie had to be thrown away because he was trying to film without a screenplay, that he didn’t know what he was doing. These admissions are doubly impressive given the finished film’s incredible sophistication — in concept, execution and technical finesse.

The full extras are listed below. Most amazing is the twenty minutes of behind-the-scenes footage, from early glimpses of Brownlow directing in 16mm in 1957, to shots of the finished film’s giant London marquee at the 1966 premiere. In an interview excerpt Brownlow confesses that he wore a colored shirt to an earlier TV interview to defend his picture, making him look like a blackshirt Nazi. His hour-long interview with TCM is a delight, essentially the same story from his book with extra anecdotes. The only humiliating aspect is that the increasingly corporate Turner Classic Movies MADE HIM WEAR A TCM HAT. Bfi includes a fat insert booklet as well. We find out that the teenaged Brownlow was influenced by reading Nineteen Eighty-Four and John Wyndham science fiction, and seeing the atom-threat thriller Seven Days to Noon (1950). He remembers that his story idea came alive when he saw a German tourist in London exit a ‘Gestapo-like’ car and run quickly into a shop.

The craziest extra is a 1964 Italian RAI TV documentary clip shows scenes from It Happened Here and identifies them as documentary footage from a film called “The Conquest of London.’ It’s shocking, but nothing compared to the disinformation in American ‘reality programming.’

Among the helpers on the show was Brownlow’s editing colleague Peter Watkins, who would soon make history with two TV films that utilize much the same ‘this is happening’ documentary look. 1964’s Culloden takes a ‘You Are There’ approach to a famous 1746 battle, as if news cameras were capturing live reportage. 1965’s The War Game is a ‘negative subjunctive’ imagining of a nuclear attack on Great Britain.

This is one of the Bfi’s Dual Format Editions. The extra PAL DVD has a DVD-Rom PDF file with an introduction by critic David Robinson.

I personally first heard of It Happened Here in 1972, when Randy Cook introduced me to Bob (Robert S.) Birchard. Already an authority on silent movies, Bob had photo credits in Brownlow books, and the It Happened Here book was on his coffee table. I immediately asked to borrow it. I didn’t actually see the movie until a 1980 special screening at the Sherman Theater in Sherman Oaks, a 16mm print with a mostly inaudible soundtrack.

In 2012 Kevin Brownlow presented the WW2 English thriller Went the Day Well? at the TCM fest in Hollywood. His talk was authoritative, inspirational and hilarious. Although Brownlow didn’t push the connection, the morale-building wartime movie has ideas in common with It Happened Here. Its fictional yarn about an attempted German invasion of England is told in a flashback from some future date when the war is won, after ‘Adolf has got what was coming to him.’

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

It Happened HereRegion A+B Blu-ray + PAL DVD rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements (from the Bfi): video extras: Mirror on the World (1962, 10 mins): full version of fake German newsreel; It Happened Here: Behind the Scenes (1956-66, 22 mins): previously unseen footage with new commentary by Kevin Brownlow; Original UK and US trailers (1966); It Happened Here Again (1976, 7 mins): excerpt from a documentary on Winstanley; Interview excerpt with the directors (2009, 2 mins); The Conquest of London (1964/2005, 4 mins): Italian TV item; On Set With Brownlow and Mollo (2018, 12 mins): interview with Production Assistant Johanna Roeber; Kevin Brownlow Remembers It Happened Here (2018, 65 mins). Image gallery; Text Introduction to How It Happened Here: text of David Robinson’s foreword to the book (Downloadable PDF DVD only). Illustrated booklet with writing by Kevin Brownlow and new essays by Dr Josephine Botting, DoP Peter Suschitzky and military historian E.W.W Fowler.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: August 4, 2018(5792here)

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/it-happened-here/feed/11https://trailersfromhell.com/it-happened-here/Heaven Can Waithttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/ecuPiLSJYrY/
https://trailersfromhell.com/heaven-can-wait-2/#commentsTue, 07 Aug 2018 17:28:49 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34568 This may be the year for new cinephile converts to the cult of appreciation for the great Ernst Lubitsch. One of his last pictures but his first in color is this Production Code-defying tale of a serial philanderer and his relationship with the woman of his dreams, his wife. It’s stylized as a series...

This may be the year for new cinephile converts to the cult of appreciation for the great Ernst Lubitsch. One of his last pictures but his first in color is this Production Code-defying tale of a serial philanderer and his relationship with the woman of his dreams, his wife. It’s stylized as a series of birthdays, and our hero is judged not by St. Peter but at the gates of Hades, by the fallen angel himself.

Wait one second, this isn’t the Heaven Can Wait from 1978, with Warren Beatty — that movie is actually a remake of Alexander Hall’s 1941 film blanc Here Comes Mr. Jordan. This is Ernst Lubitsch’s wartime hit Heaven Can Wait, a classic that will amuse casual viewers while captivating fans of the director’s inimitable style. Lubitsch’s importance can be judged by the worship of his disciple Billy Wilder, no slouch himself when it comes to clever screen comedy.

Heaven Can Wait flirts with bad taste (1943 bad taste) to tell the story of a philandering husband convinced he’s prime material for Satan’s infernal domain. Lubitsch had been making light of illicit affairs and other human foibles since the silent days, and still seems to be constructing a case for looking the other way when swain Don Ameche enters the scene. We hardly ever see him do anything deserving of a slap on the wrist, let alone a trip to Hell . . . yet the attitudes put forward in Samson Raphaelson’s script are unlikely to be lauded by feminists.

The film floats on charm, cute characters, and witty dialog that supports its main thesis — ‘love and an impish smile conquer all.’ Top- billed Gene Tierney is adorable but the real star is the under-appreciated Don Ameche. The capable actor unfortunately fell out of style about the same time that Humphrey Bogart ascended to the Pantheon. Instead of a versatile leading man, Ameche for a few years became synonymous with epitome of cornball casting, just for playing the guy who invented the telephone. After years spent mostly in television, in the 1980s director John Landis brought him back for major supporting roles.

Before the story turns to time-hopping, it begins in a post-life limbo. Playboy Henry Van Cleave (Don Ameche) voluntarily shows up at the devil’s doorstep, to ask Satan (Laird Cregar) to let him into his fiery domain without further fuss; he knows only too well that he’s been a faithless lout all of his life. Together they re-run Henry’s story from his childhood in the 1880s, past his elopement with Martha, the fiancée of his own cousin (Gene Tierney), and onward through decades of marriage. Henry’s charm has always earned him the indulgence of his parents, the encouragement of his grandfather (Charles Coburn), and the attentions of many women, and Henry is convinced that trying his luck at the pearly gates would be pointless.

This fanciful story was something of a departure for Lubitsch, who had his big bedroom farce hits but didn’t repeat himself that often. Heaven Can Wait is a core film blanc, one of those fanciful movies that postulates a Heavenly afterlife, usually as some sort of waiting room in the clouds where souls in transit face up to their sins. The problem most often is that some undone business or unpaid debt back on Earth needs to be straightened out, and the rules of Heaven and Earth have to be tweaked a little to ensure a happy ending.

Heaven Can Wait honors the form and spoofs it as well, with the urbane Henry Van Cleave showing up at Satan’s reception room to pay the piper. Ol’ Beezelbub is there in person. Satan loses his patience with an annoying older woman, and drops her through a fiery trap door. But he’s sufficiently intrigued by Henry’s lack of panic to ask to hear his story.

What we get in flashback form is Henry’s life, reduced to a series of eventful birthdays. He learns about ‘fun’ from a French maid (Signe Hasso) and finds out that little girls like gifts in exchange for their company. Interestingly, although the story alludes to a constant stream of girlfriends, lovers and affairs we see none of them, just their effects. Henry’s doting and slightly dense parents are easy touches for money; the idea of this man working for a living is never given a thought.

The story covers a time from roughly 1870 to 1940, yet ignores the usual historical signposts. There are no headlines of wars starting or stock markets crashing. Henry appears to live outside of all of those petty concerns, in a world of his own interests. Hmmm … womanizer, non-working lounge lizard … it’s interesting that Henry could be considered a positive character in a movie made during WW2. His type were usually played by Clifton Webb or Tom Conway, more often than not as bad guys.

The secret is charm, a Lubitsch specialty. Henry’s parents cave in and give him money whenever he smiles. A few choice words in a bookstore (“You don’t need a book called ‘How to Make Your Husband Happy!'”) and Henry wins the woman of his life, who turns out to be the new fiancé of his snooty cousin. Henry literally sweeps his conquest off her feet in front of their assembled families, and gets away with it. After all, she only said yes to his cousin to get away from her obnoxious parents (Marjorie Main and Eugene Pallette).

Heaven Can Wait doesn’t bother to make excuses for Henry’s philandering and instead prefers to lobby for his cause around the edges. Charles Coburn’s delightful grandfather lives vicariously through Henry’s naughty adventures, inviting us to share his enthusiasm. Marriage as defined by society is given a terrible beating. Henry’s parents are a pair of sexless sweethearts living in a bubble. Wife Martha’s parents are lampooned in what would appear to be a takeoff of the Citizen Kane domestic scene where Kane and his wife are at opposite ends of a long table. Their marriage has deteriorated to the point where their servant has to carry messages from one end of the table to the other.

We’re also invited to feel sorry for Henry when his rooster feathers have gone gray and the showgirls no longer see him as an attractive catch. Never mind that he still defines himself in terms of how many female heads he can turn: we are assured he still loves Martha as deeply as ever. The movie stays within the confines of the Breen Code yet snubs its nose at most every tenet involving respect in marriage. That’s pretty good shootin’ for Ernst and his ace screenwriter Samson Raphaelson.

Don Ameche is nothing short of wonderful, and it’s a shame that postwar fashion would push him aside in favor of a diet of he-man types and younger blood. That makes his late-career return almost forty years later all the more pleasing. Gene Tierney is appropriately ravishing and handles her comedy well. Her incredible looks got her through a many ordinary pix until a couple of positive hits like this one led to Laura and mainstream stardom. Lubitsch gets a full, polished performer from Tierney. Charles Coburn is a hit as the randy granddad and Spring Byington intensely lovable as Henry’s indulgent mom. Allyn Joslyn makes a perfect dullsville cousin, the kind who can be cruelly cheated and we don’t care a bit. He has a nice scene where he re-proposes to Martha by describing himself as an old suit of clothes. Martha smiles, but cousin hasn’t a prayer.

(spoiler) Henry, on the other hand, seems to have snookered Satan fairly well, although he seems sincere. Satan overlooks all those implied marital indiscretions and puts Henry on the fast elevator to the stars. The final bit of class in Heaven Can Wait is that it doesn’t even need the kind of romantic reunion scene that gushes forth in most movies of this subgenre — there’s no direct image of a movie star waiting for Henry at the pearly gates. All the better, as we finish the film with a happy sense of anticipation.

Dickie Moore plays Henry as a troublemaking teenager. The Tod Andrews that plays Henry’s grown son appears to indeed be the same Tod Andrews that later battled a walking tree in the movie From Hell It Came. That title would read well on a double bill marquee below Heaven Can Wait, we have to admit.

Joseph McBride’s new book about Ernst Lubitsch How Did Lubitsch Do It? must spend forty pages on this one movie, trying to untangle the way the master comedy filmmaker makes philandering, adultery and caddish behavior somehow palatable with the Breen Office. McBride tells us that Lubitsch played Satan twice in silent movies; maybe this Devil takes a liking to Henry Van Cleave because they have so much in common — we’re surprised that the Devil doesn’t keep Henry in his waiting room just so the he can have some pleasant company. McBride also describes a scene that was planned and not filmed, of the widower Henry marrying a gold digger, who moves in with her whole family. Lubitsch replaced it with a simpler scene in which the elderly Henry tries to get his son to hire an attractive young woman to ‘read to him.’

And we still like the character!

The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray of Heaven Can Wait is a dazzler in a new 4K restoration by Twentieth- Fox and the Academy Film Archive. The Film Foundation contributed to the project as well. This show always looked good in color, probably because of a well-made Eastman composite from the original Technicolor elements. We can immediately tell that it’s a Fox film, with all those blue tones in the art direction. In Fox’s color pictures of the 1940s the heavy makeup base was so uniform that the actors don’t seem to have skin texture at all — it’s a particular artificial look.

Criterion has repeated the same extras from its 2010 DVD release. The extras are well chosen, considering that the picture’s creative talent have long since passed away. Critics Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris carry a spirited discussion of the film, Critic’s Corner-style. Screenwriter Samson Raphaelson is given his due in a Bill Moyers PBS Creativity with … episode, where we see the crusty old playwright advising theater students. Another Raphaelson extra is an audio recording of a seminar hosted by Richard Corliss in 1977. Lubitsch’s daughter hosts a photo montage over audio of the director playing the piano. And there’s an original trailer stressing the film’s few bits of overt slapstick, along with an insert essay by William Paul.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/heaven-can-wait-2/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/heaven-can-wait-2/The Satan Bughttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/q6tkVbyTImI/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-satan-bug-2/#commentsMon, 06 Aug 2018 04:00:08 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34539John Sturges’ 1965 film flaunts Cold War thrills and Strangelovian plot turns worthy of an Alistair MacLean novel – which is just where the story came from. It’s a typically solid Sturges production with prime work from cinematographer Robert Surtees and composer Jerry Goldsmith. Star George Maharis is a colorless leading man but vets Richard...

]]>John Sturges’ 1965 film flaunts Cold War thrills and Strangelovian plot turns worthy of an Alistair MacLean novel – which is just where the story came from. It’s a typically solid Sturges production with prime work from cinematographer Robert Surtees and composer Jerry Goldsmith. Star George Maharis is a colorless leading man but vets Richard Basehart, Anne Francis and Dana Andrews flesh out the cast nicely.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-satan-bug-2/feed/2https://trailersfromhell.com/the-satan-bug-2/Cradle Will Rockhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/YVsBaX_Etsk/
https://trailersfromhell.com/cradle-will-rock/#commentsSat, 04 Aug 2018 18:52:39 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34536 Writer-director Tim Robbins goes all out to recreate a politically potent chapter of Broadway legend, the true story of the rebel WPA production The Cradle Will Rock — with a dynamic sidebar about Diego Rivera’s provocative mural for the Rockefeller Center. An enormous cast works up the excitement of Depression-era revolutionary theater. Cradle Will...

Writer-director Tim Robbins goes all out to recreate a politically potent chapter of Broadway legend, the true story of the rebel WPA production The Cradle Will Rock — with a dynamic sidebar about Diego Rivera’s provocative mural for the Rockefeller Center. An enormous cast works up the excitement of Depression-era revolutionary theater.

Cradle Will Rock is an elaborate, colorful and tuneful celebration of a slice of Depression-era history, namely the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theater Project. Writer-Director Tim Robbins embellishes the facts with added ideas, but they’re all minor character additions. It’s a good idea to refer to a cast list while watching, because the show hits us with a lot of exciting characters, many of them taken from real life.

Robbins’ story dramatizes the theater scene in New York 1934-1937, cross-referencing events the same way that E.L. Doctorow did in his multi-story novel Ragtime. Packed with historical personages, it’s also totally unabashed about the political makeup of the Roosevelt- backed WPA: among the actors, theater producers and FTP bureaucrats are leftists, communists, labor agitators, blacks, Jews, anti-Fascist Italians, homosexuals and a homeless woman who becomes the star of the show. It’s an ultimate ‘Let’s put on a show!’ movie, populated by idealists inflamed by economic and social injustice. Think of the movie as Topsy-Turvy, except that the theater is radical and most of the players destitute.

In the 1980s Orson Welles wrote a screenplay about the creation of Marc Blitzstein’s musical agit-prop theater piece The Cradle Will Rock, reportedly telling his own life story in the process. Tim Robbins makes Welles just one of twenty-odd fascinating characters, to weave a rich tale around events leading up to a legendary night in June 1937, when the ‘show went on,’ but in a totally unexpected way.

The famous people named by name in the course of the story are Orson Welles (director of the play The Cradle Will Rock), John Houseman (the producer), Marc Blitzstein (the writer-songwriter) Hallie Flanagan (the director of the Federal Theater Project), Olive Stanton (actress), Nelson Rockefeller (patron of the arts), Margherita Sarfatti (Italian arts emissary), Diego Rivera (firebrand artist), Frida Kahlo (artist), William Randolph Hearst (millionaire), Marion Davies (actress), Martin Dies (Congressman), Bertolt Brecht (playwright) and Will Geer (actor).

You’ll really want to look up some of the names above. Audiences unfamiliar with WPA history may find themselves totally lost; Robbins almost needs to use the Quentin Tarantino gimmick of stopping the movie for sidebar exposition and personal histories.

Cradle Will Rock conflates two separate landmark events of the Depression years, the Federal Theater Project’s final theatrical creation, and the story of Diego Rivera’s radical mural Man at the Crossroads commissioned for Rockefeller Center. FTP director Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), producer John Houseman (Cary Elwes), and the barely twenty year-old radio star and theater director Orson Welles all flip over Marc Blitzstein’s musical agit-prop theater piece The Cradle Will Rock. Rehearsals begin even as events in Washington pull the rug out from under the show — The proto- un-American activities committee headed by Congressman Martin Dies is undermining President Roosevelt’s New Deal by claiming that the FTP is run by Communists. Just before the play is set to open, Federal troops padlock the theater, locking out the acting company.

Meanwhile (although it really happened earlier) Nelson Rockefeller hires dynamic Mexican artist Diego Rivera (Rubén Blades) to paint a giant mural, and Rivera uses the opportunity to express his political feelings and his contempt for his millionaire patron. The mural depicts the decadent rich, the oppressed poor, brutal police and an image of Lenin; Rockefeller is understandably displeased.

Both Rivera and Blitzstein subscribed to the idea that art is confrontation. The mural is a call to revolution and Blitzstein’s play sees labor unionization as a way to rise up against rampant capitalism. In today’s divided country, Tim Robbins’ movie will be considered controversial as well. The very large cast really gets behind Robbins’ ambitious screenplay, which uses a clique of rich art patrons to tie the play and mural together. Rockefeller (John Cusack) is indeed more interested in art than oil, but he hangs out with William Randolph Hearst (John Carpenter) and Gray Mathers (Philip Baker Hall), millionaires that amuse themselves by buying up priceless foreign art, as secure investments. Newly arrived from Rome is Benito Mussolini’s unofficial representative Margherita Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon), who uses her ‘giveaways’ of art treasures to encourage American investment in the Fascist regime. Sarfatti also knows Diego Rivera; they have a testy conversation, from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Countess Constance La Grange (Vanessa Redgrave) is Gray Mathers’ consort, but she also keeps an artist in the house, Carlo (Paul Giamatti). A fan of theater, Constance sits in on FTP rehearsals, and steps in to help when the premiere of Cradle is threatened. The millionaires hold a decadent costume ball on the night of the Cradle premiere. At the same time, a crew hired by Rockefeller is demolishing the same Rivera mural he paid so much to have painted.

The brash and infinitely narcissistic Orson Welles (Angus Macfadyen) dominates the rehearsals for his play, flaunting his radio success while berating the union actors for wanting work breaks. He has an uneasy relationship with John Houseman, but unerring good judgment in his casting. For the main role of the pitiful prostitute, Welles hires Olive Stanton (Emily Watson), a stagehand who was formerly homeless, singing for nickels on the street. Italian-American actor Aldo Silvano (John Turturro) plays Blitzstein’s union organizer hero, a role originated by the legendary actor Howard Da Silva. Silvano’s wife Sophie (Barbara Sukowa) must deliver Aldo’s third child in a charity ward; rather than put up with his fascist brother, Aldo moves his family into a slum.

FTP directress Flanagan oversees a flourishing nationwide system of Federally funded theater; her staff takes a break to enjoy an audition two actors that have come up with an entire ‘Revolt of the Beavers’ play to be staged for children. Down in the hiring hall, clerk Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack) breaks the rules to help Olive Stanton get a job as a stagehand. But at night, Hazel also convenes a grievance committee of FTA employees. Some just don’t like the idea that blacks are being hired, but vaudeville ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw (Bill Murray) attends to complain that the Program forces him to teach his trade to untalented youngsters, ‘for the future of vaudeville.’ The talentless Sid and Larry (Jack Black & Kyle Gass) pretend to be learning while stealing Tommy’s act. Tommy is attracted to Hazel, and doesn’t mind that she turns her secret meeting into a hate group — convinced that the FTP is riddled with communists, she volunteers to testify before the Dies Committee.

Robbins embraces the style and excitement of the times, partly shaping his movie as agit-prop. The down ‘n’ outs and idealistic theater people struggle to work in Roosevelt’s work programs, while the rich use their pocketbooks to encourage ‘colorful, pretty’ art that has no political viewpoint. The flamboyant, creative and politically astute Orson Welles is also a massive pain in the neck; some of his actors also want to change the world but most are mainly concerned with avoiding starvation. The movie works because the performances put vibrancy into the put-on-a-show idealism.

The film is packed with vibrant characterizations. Emily Watson starts as somebody out of Les Miserables and ends up personifying the spirit of theater liberated from old-fashioned restraints. Hank Azaria shines as the obsessed playwright, taking key scenes for his show out of personal experience. He imagines both Bertolt Brecht and his dead wife coaching him from the sidelines, challenging his political viewpoint. Blitzstein plays an imaginary piano in the middle of a police riot, yet the scene doesn’t come off as affected. Actor Frank Marvel (Barnard Hughes) has trouble learning the lines of the play’s capitalist villain Mr. Mister — his memory is fading but he has to keep working to live.

Bill Murray’s ventriloquist plays along with Joan Cusack’s anti-Communist games because he wants romance; he doesn’t realize that she’s as frigid as her rabid politics. Nelson Rockefeller is taken in by Diego Rivera’s uninhibited art loft, where he’s invited to drink and dance with Diego’s libertine models (and a wickedly contemptuous Frida Kahlo). Diego’s commitment to political expression knows no limits; he grasps the opportunity to confront his capitalist sponsor with a communist mural.

Two more vibrant women top off Robbins cinematic ‘mural.’ Susan Sarandon’s Margherita Sarfatti hobnobs with the millionaires, trying to get them to collaborate (collude) with the interests of Fascist Italy. A former Mussolini mistress, Sarfatti sells art treasures. The irony is that she is Jewish. Just a year or so later Mussolini will throw in with Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, and Margherita will have to flee to Argentina.

Much brighter is Vanessa Redgrave’s Countess, who at first seems a frivolous let-them-eat-cake type, a carefree heiress who keeps a freeloader artist on a leash. But the Countess repeatedly refuses to play along with her millionaire protector’s plans for a ritzy, decadent costume ball. The moment when she leaps from his car and bids him farewell with a smile and flurry of arm-waving, is priceless.

Robbins directs with great confidence, knowing that his story threads will converge on a can’t-lose dramatic climax, the performance of The Cradle Will Rock. With their theater locked up, Houseman finds a disused venue to do the play without costumes or scenery. Orson leads the ticket-holding audience on a twenty-block exodus to the new theater. The crowd follows because everything associated with the Boy Wonder seems to become a semi-historic event. Since the unions won’t let the actors go on stage, the plan is for Marc Blitzstein to simply play the piano and sing all the parts, so at least the audience will know what Cradle is all about (“How do I sing the duets?”).

What happened then is the stuff of theatrical legend. The audience is fully aware that they are present for an outlaw radical production. Alone on stage, Blitzstein sits at the piano, reciting the stage directions and beginning to sing the prostitute’s song. Starting with Olive Stanton, the actors stand up in the audience or in the wings, and begin singing their parts, improvising the staging without putting a foot on the stage. Aldo Silvano is attending with his family. To the delight of his children, he suddenly leaps up and takes his cue, singing at the top of his lungs. It’s unclear whether, in reality, the ‘volunteer’ performances were planned, but this was supposedly the birth of American audience participation theater. The effect is electrifying.

Orson Welles is such a distinct personality that his presence in a movie is always a hard sell; this show’s version neither looks like him nor has the commanding voice that Orson surely figured out at age seventeen. Cary Elwes affects a younger version of John Houseman’s effete, fussy voice, but if you’ve ever heard the man speak it doesn’t quite catch his character either. Houseman was so naturally articulate, listening to anything he had to say was always a pleasure. Fans of Welles and Houseman may be offended by what amounts as a clown act between them.

Welles is made to seem lunatic director — his Faust looks identical to the overdone, disastrous ‘Jeffrey Cordova’ staging in The Band Wagon. Having proof elsewhere of real Welles’ genius for invention, it’s likely that contributed more to the saving of Cradle than just march his audience twenty blocks to the new venue. I’d easily believe that it was Orson who improvised the ‘impromptu’ staging plan that circumvented the Union rules, and created a new ‘theater without limits.’

Silent fans won’t be pleased by the depiction of Marion Davies, either — she comes off as a heavy-drinking simpleton. I guess we’ll never know how these famous folk really behaved in public.

The director never loses control of his visuals. When he opts for an unusual angle he isn’t pretentious, while his ‘big’ effects frequently hit the bulls-eye. Robbins’ ends his show with an ironic bang. The camera dives from on high into the enraptured face of Emily Watson — and then cuts powerfully to a single shot that pulls us back to the corporate controlled commercial reality of today.

Movies like Cradle Will Rock were always commercially risky propositions. The show did not become the big hit it deserved to be, and although it and Robbins won festival accolades oversees, it received no Oscar attention whatsoever.

The KL Studio ClassicsBlu-ray of Cradle Will Rock is a sharp and colorful scan of this Touchstone feature. The color looks great and ‘all technical specs’ are high-quality. The widescreen picture has excellent sound. The subtitles help with some of the faster dialogue. Perhaps the sub-titler was expressing his or her own artistic form of confrontation, because the subs repeatedly replace the word ‘Jesus,’ with ‘news.’

Kino gives us a making-of featurette, several trailers and a relaxed commentary from writer-director Tim Robbins. The new talk explains which characters are real and which are made up or combined. As I suspected, Robbins lifted Paul Giamatti’s Carlo character from Gregory La Cava’s screwball comedy My Man Godfrey, in which the great Mischa Auer played another freeloader named Carlo. Robbins fills in more historical background — fired from the Federal Theater Project, John Houseman and Orson Welles turned right around and founded The Mercury Theater, beginning yet another chapter in performing history.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/cradle-will-rock/feed/6https://trailersfromhell.com/cradle-will-rock/Home from the Hillhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/4CZ8n5MSrjg/
https://trailersfromhell.com/home-from-the-hill/#commentsSat, 04 Aug 2018 18:50:26 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34535 He-bull womanizer Robert Mitchum spars with wife Eleanor Parker for the future of their son George Hamilton in Vincente Minnelli’s attractive, sprawling tale of cruel family unrest. The real winners in the picture are the fresh-faced George Peppard and Luana Patten, whose small-town romance is more interesting than the main bout. Home from the...

He-bull womanizer Robert Mitchum spars with wife Eleanor Parker for the future of their son George Hamilton in Vincente Minnelli’s attractive, sprawling tale of cruel family unrest. The real winners in the picture are the fresh-faced George Peppard and Luana Patten, whose small-town romance is more interesting than the main bout.

Two and a half hours for a dramatic film was considered long in 1960, but with the current trend of binge-watching ten- and twenty- hour series and miniseries, Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill won’t be much of a strain. It has big stars, with Robert Mitchum in particularly fine form. Minnelli had directed the actor early in his starring career, in Undercurrent with Katharine Hepburn, when Mitchum seemed a poor fit for the MGM brand of gloss. Fourteen years later, here he is a top star in an expensive Metro production, much of it shot on location in Mississippi.

Judging by Vincente Minnelli’s filmic output one would think that the collapse of MGM in the 1950s had never happened. Minnelli kept turning out color and CinemaScope films into the middle sixties, among them giant hits like 1958’s Gigi, an Oscar winner for Best Picture. Minnelli may have officially launched the Rat Pack by teaming Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in Some Came Running. For this epic-scaled soap opera he turned to Mitchum, who probably liked the idea of a fat acting payday after producing his two ‘DRM’ pictures, Thunder Road and The Wonderful Country. Mitchum never walked through a performance but it was also easy to tell the projects that interested him from the ones that didn’t. In parts of this picture he’s as good as he is anywhere.

By the look of the cars, the show takes place in East Texas in the late 1940s or early ’50s. Land baron Capt. Wade Hunnicutt (Mitchum) has a formidable reputation as a tomcat and has been ‘romantically connected’ to most of the attractive females in the county. It’s all due to a lousy marriage to Hannah (Eleanor Parker), whose fury knows no bounds. On their return from a European honeymoon long ago, one of Wade’s lady friends confronted Hannah with his newborn bastard son. Hannah hasn’t slept with Wade since. Now Wade has a legitimate 17 year-old son, Theron (George Hamilton) that Hannah has turned into a real mama’s boy. Wade breaks his promise and takes the gangly youth under his wing, allowing him to quit school and teaching him the manly art of hunting, the favorite local sport. Theron proves himself by defeating a ferocious wild hog, but runs up against trouble when he tries to date the local ‘nice’ girl Libby Halstead (Luana Patten of Song of the South and Johnny Tremain). She’s game but her father Albert (Everett Sloane) throws Theron out, fearful of his daughter being ravaged by a Hunnicutt. Theron and Libby choose to meet in secret, which leads to trouble…

That’s when Theron discovers a deep secret about his father’s young foreman Rafe Copley (George Peppard), and rejects Wade and his whole privileged setup. The boy moves out, breaking his mother’s heart. But when Libby turns up with a problem pregnancy, town gossip and runaway emotions get out of hand.

Vincente Minnelli has always been the darling of the auteurists. He spent almost all of his career as a top-rank MGM director, and made some of the studio’s best musicals. For his later dramas Minnelli was praised for his use of the CinemaScope screen and his literally color-coded themes. The dramatics in these shows lacked subtlety, whether it was Kirk Douglas grimacing in a mirror in Lust for Life or just about everything in the over-acted, overcooked The Cobweb. Part of the Curse of MGM was shooting ’50s and ’60s movies with the studio’s old techniques. A potentially good picture like Brigadoon played out against some of the biggest, least attractive cycloramic sets ever painted. A big chunk of Home from the Hill was filmed on location, yet Minnelli set the art directors loose on reality as well. One can imagine his corps of set dressers worrying over the texture and tint of every blade of swamp shrubbery. To depict swamp gas, we see billows of yellowish smoke.

In one scene George Peppard talks to Luana Patten as she washes a car. The first half of their talk appears to be filmed on location. Then the scene suddenly switches to a studio interior, matching everything except the lighting and atmosphere. Minnelli would later go to CineCittá to film Two Weeks in Another Town, yet shot almost everything on the Culver City back lot.

Robert Mitchum is like a rock — the film is enjoyable just to watch him perform. The actor paints a good portrait of someone with contradictory beliefs. Wade insists on his prerogative at all times, and is callous in his treatment of other people. He certainly has no inhibitions against persecuting Rafe or bullying Theron, so we see no reason why Wade wouldn’t have dragged his unhappy wife to bed whether she wanted to go or not. Wade proudly tells us that some of the stuffed animal heads on his wall put up tough fights before they died, and we want to laugh at his idea of fair odds.

Mostly filmed on location, Minnelli’s hunting scenes are actually rather good. He uses long trucking shots to show the men tracking a wild boar, which mangles several dogs before being cornered in a clearing. The scene seems patterned on one from Clarence Brown’s The Yearling, but stands on its own. An entire segment of America still subscribes to Wade Hunnicutt’s definition of manliness as proved through a physical ritual, preferably with guns.

Eleanor Parker frequently excelled as desirable women that win difficult men through courage and resolve, as witness her excellent work in Byron Haskin’s The Naked Jungle. But the Hill script leaves her Hannah mostly out in the cold. Her formal manners are so constricted, it seems odd that Theron wouldn’t notice her emotional problems until now. When Hannah defies Wade by refusing his advances, she comes off as a frigid bore, not a righteous woman wronged. Then Hannah must become overly hysterical when her ‘baby’ boy is taken away.

Minnelli concentrates instead on the male relationships. Wade’s personal posse of tenant farmers (including Dub Taylor and Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams) act like yokels and are too broadly played. They inadvertently spread rumors of Wade’s sexual exploits to the wrong ears. The film has two ‘new star’ discoveries. George Hamilton has the plum role and isn’t particularly convincing; although only twenty, he already looks too old. Anthony Perkins was by now also too old to play yet another insecure teenager. Hamilton would score highly desirable parts for years to come, based I suppose on his good looks and impeccable poise.

Home from the Hill‘s real find is George Peppard, who as Wade’s foreman and Theron’s pal steals the movie outright. Peppard’s natural hayseed Rafe is the only person in the story who knows his own mind, and is therefore the one we gravitate toward. The script prepares us well for scenes that resolve Rafe’s deep need to find his rightful place in the world. Peppard had been in a couple of movies and quite a lot of TV, but after this show he became a major star with Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Young Luana Patten never became a noted name, but she’s the second reason to watch Home from the Hill. Her local girl Libby shares interacts with Rafe in a supermarket and a coffee shop, scenes so good they almost dissolve the barrier of MGM gloss. Their conversation moves quickly to a marriage proposal that is believable and compelling, and seems a good idea for everybody. By the end of the show, we care much more about Rafe and Libby’s situation than we do the marital split between Wade and Hannah. In fact, when Mitchum’s great hunter finally ‘comes home from the hill’ for a last-minute reconciliation, all we can ask is why it didn’t happen nineteen years and fifty-one weeks earlier.

Minnelli wraps up his tale with a throat-tightening graveyard scene that always wins audience approval. It worries us that Rafe extends an invitation to Hannah to move into his household. An un-filmed sequel could have been called Over the Hill; in it Libby would get fed up with Hannah butting into her home life and leave town with the baby. For that matter, how will Libby ever put up with Rafe’s stinking hounds, the ones that come running when he clicks his fingers? Will Rafe revert to form, and try the same finger-snapping obedience trick on Libby?

Constance Ford has 2.5 scenes as one of Wade’s good-time girls. Everett Sloane carries an intense but thankless part as Libby’s resentful father Albert. I was rather hoping that Albert and Hannah would surprise the pompous Wade by revealing that they’d been carrying on a decade-long affair; that would even the score somewhat. Home from the Hill’s Alpha-male Wade Hunnicutt learns the most important lessons in life and love twenty years too late. He defines himself by the racks and racks of loaded guns he keeps in his den. It is fitting that the story is resolved in old-fashioned Hollywood style … with an All-American ambush gun-down.

As with other CinemaScope Vincente Minnelli features, the Warner Archive Collection’sBlu-ray is Home from the Hill’s first good home video presentation. Minnelli films so many scenes in wide masters that the added resolution of HD is really a boost for the reading of facial expressions. Colors are very good, right down to the pale yellow clouds of ‘sulphur steam’ that mark the deadly quicksand on Wade Hunnicutt’s property — and remind us of the smoke effects he used in pictures like An American in Paris and The Band Wagon.

The clear audio gives us an earful of Bronislau Kaper’s title tune, which sounds almost exactly like the opening bars of the ‘Tammy’ song associated with Debbie Reynolds’ Tammy and the Bachelor (1957). A trailer is included.

Could the same director’s Some Came Running be on the way? The ratty old analog copy shown on TCM has recently been replaced with a beautiful new encoding, which makes me think that we will have more Minnelli in our future.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/home-from-the-hill/feed/3https://trailersfromhell.com/home-from-the-hill/Casablancahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/SQt-eWA76nE/
https://trailersfromhell.com/casablanca/#commentsFri, 03 Aug 2018 04:00:40 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=9799The movie that cemented Bogart and Bergman’s star status remains a miracle of studio filmmaking over 70 years later. Troubled behind the scenes, yet every element coalesced into a stirring, satisfying entertainment that still merits its status as one of the top Hollywood pictures ever. We can only imagine the impact it had on wartime...

]]>The movie that cemented Bogart and Bergman’s star status remains a miracle of studio filmmaking over 70 years later. Troubled behind the scenes, yet every element coalesced into a stirring, satisfying entertainment that still merits its status as one of the top Hollywood pictures ever. We can only imagine the impact it had on wartime audiences.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/casablanca/feed/2https://trailersfromhell.com/casablanca/To Be or Not to Behttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/WqkSZO3-sz0/
https://trailersfromhell.com/to-be-or-not-to-be/#commentsWed, 01 Aug 2018 04:00:41 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=2651Jack Benny’s greatest movie role, and no wonder–it was written especially for him by Ernst Lubitsch! Carole Lombard’s swan song earned her some of her finest reviews posthumously, but the film itself, daringly dark for the time, was generally regarded as an insensitive and even troubling satire of wartime issues. The title refers not only...

]]>Jack Benny’s greatest movie role, and no wonder–it was written especially for him by Ernst Lubitsch! Carole Lombard’s swan song earned her some of her finest reviews posthumously, but the film itself, daringly dark for the time, was generally regarded as an insensitive and even troubling satire of wartime issues. The title refers not only to Shakespeare but the questionable existence of Poland. It has since been recognized as one of the director’s finest efforts and a brilliantly cast comedy classic. Remade in 1983 with Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft in the leads.

When John Huston movies are good, they’re great, and when they’re not they’re bad in a watchable way. I’m told that Huston didn’t have a real hit between The Night of the Iguana in 1964 and The Man Who Would Be King in 1975, but we always ran to see his new pictures. I personally love The Kremlin Letter, The Mackintosh Man and Fat City, but I know I’m in the minority. The 1972 The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is not exactly core John Huston material. It’s a Paul Newman vehicle for the newly-formed First Artists’ film company, and its ‘hot’ writer John Milius was following in the steps of Francis Coppola by leveraging his scripts into a directing career.

Newman must have been attracted to the project’s wacky take on the Roy Bean character. Nobody except film fans will know that the show is a return to the subject of William Wyler’s 1940 The Westerner. That marvelous acting opportunity earned Walter Brennan his third Supporting Actor Oscar. Nothing has changed much. In place of Jo Swerling & Niven Busch’s concentrated characterizations, screenwriter Milius gives us loose comic episodes that undercut the values of traditional westerns. Newman’s task as Bean is to grumble and mumble a series of ironic and irreverent one-liners. The other characters are sentimental ciphers. The whole thing is amusing, and two or three times it’s fall-down funny. But it’s also slack and directionless, and leans on the ‘frontier fable’ conceit to maintain its shaggy dog narrative.

Bank robber Roy Bean (Paul Newman) stops off in Vinegaroon, Texas and is robbed and beaten by the thugs he finds there. His response is to conduct a bloodbath and set himself up as the Law West of the Pecos. He deputizes a quintet of starving bandits, who are soon bringing in hang-able criminals with confiscate=able property. Bean’s idea of justice is how ever he feels at a given time. He loves Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), the orphan who saved his life and stays by his side. He also loves (from afar) the famous actress Lily Langtree (Ava Gardner), his dream of feminine perfection. Visitors to Bean’s enclave include the Reverend LaSalle (Anthony Perkins), the luckless, stammering thief Sam Dodd (Tab Hunter), and Grizzly Adams (John Huston), who leaves Roy with a new pet, a ‘Watch Bear’ (Bruno the Bear). Roy’s enemies include the The Original Bad Bob (Stacy Keach) a frightening albino outlaw killer, and the scheming Frank Gass (Roddy McDowall), who first tries to commit a James Addison Reavis- like land fraud on Roy, and then stakes his claim as a predatory attorney.

Milius and Huston’s gambit is to wax reverential on the worship of classic westerns, and then undercut every detail with cynical joke dialogue. This Roy Bean is that dependable rustic type, the lovable hypocrite. He empties the pockets of ‘evildoers’ before he hangs them, and frequently quotes the Bible to give himself credibility. Bean keeps a fat law book, as if possession of it makes him a Judge. If a passage contradicts his desires, he just tears those pages out. John Milius’ notion of frontier freedom, is that the West is joyful simply because the Alpha Male big bull gets his way. The Mexican peasants stay out of sight, happy to be irrelevant. To form his new township of Langtry, Bean plays Alexander the Great, assigning prostitutes as wives to his no-account deputies. A year or two later, the women have become intolerant blue-noses, just like the nasty ‘civilized’ biddies in John Ford’s Stagecoach.

Paul Newman’s Judge grouses and chews scenery and gets the most out of the laugh lines that tag most every scene. The truth is that the show has a severe case of the cutes, perhaps inherited from his monster hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Milius just adjusts the jokes for the ‘mud & rags’ western style then in vogue. Although Roy Bean isn’t much of an acting stretch, Newman achieves more here than he does in Robert Altman’s equally shapeless Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, another long title in search of a movie.

In keeping with the scattershot fable quality the film has more than one narrator. Both Anthony Perkins and Tab Hunter’s characters address the camera directly and make observations, as if writing about the Judge in their memoirs. One is hanged and the other ‘disappears into the desert,’ never to be seen again. John Huston delivers the ‘Watch Bear,’ who serves as slapstick comedy relief much like Clint Eastwood’s orangutans in Every Which Way But Loose. Bruno must have been the nicest bear in show biz, as he chews away Paul’s cigars and takes being screamed at point blank without retaliation. Bruno features strongly in a comic ‘musical interlude’ with an Andy Williams vocal, a country picnic where the bear takes a ride in a swing.

It’s possible that Milius or Huston thought that this “Marmalade, Molasses and Honey” music video break was a good idea, but I’m betting that it came about because the real power behind the movie, Paul Newman, thought it a commercial audience pleaser. Did fellow First Artists partner Barbra Streisand lobby for the hiring of lyricists Marilyn Bergman and Alan Bergman? Raindrops don’t fall on The Bear’s head, but the sentimental montage does remind us of Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue. The Anthony Perkins character reminds us of David Warner, as well.

… not Dirty Bad Bob the Mexican,
but the original Bad Bob, the mean one, the Albino…

The show isn’t all comic skits, but the sublime skit moment in Life and Times is Stacy Keach’s five-minute stint as Bad Bob. In flowing white hair, Keach is scary and funny at the same time. He looks like the villain from the newer Mad Max movie. His demise is right out of the Waterhole #3 rule book: “The Code of the West / Is tried and it’s true / do unto others / before they do unto you.” Bob also conjures memories of the ancient Mad Magazine parody Hah! Noon! in which Marshall Kane deals with an outlaw by calling out the National Guard.

John Milius’ script is funny now and then — it has more than its share of zinger western humor. John Huston is a great director for semi-aimless shaggy stories but this one does drag on. The only character that grows on us is Ned Beatty’s bartender, who recites most of the voceover narration that glues together the disconnected episodes. Likable to a lesser degree a pitiful deputy/gang member who gets two of his toes shot off, and from that point forward manages a funny walk.

Maurice Jarre’s beautiful score frequently reminds us of sentimental passages from his other movies, especially the David Lean epics. It’s needed to provide the sweetness for relationships that otherwise are simply not there. Although Bean grieves for a lost love, he never expressed all that much interest in her, except getting excited to see her in a new dress bought by mail from Sears & Sawbuck. The gift of a music box is poignant in an old fashioned way, but the movie seems afraid to embrace its own maudlin details.

How do we know when a picture has outlived its welcome? The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean dwindles down to a rather lukewarm finish, but then tacks on not one but two lengthy postscript scenes, false endings as it were. We jump ahead twenty years to meet Bean’s feisty daughter Rose (Jacqueline Bisset). Although it provides a big shoot ’em up scene, this second ending makes us feel like we’re starting a new movie. After a full reel of Bisset, oil wells and gunfire, the show still doesn’t know when to quit. A third ending gives us Milius’ version of a ‘print the legend’ coda, with Lily Langtree (Ava Gardner) paying a visit to her namesake whistle stop town long after Roy’s demise. Since Roy was just a different kind of greedy scum than the villain Gass (Roddy McDowall), eulogizing him as an American Original doesn’t do much for us.

Those three endings are what do the film in — it seems interminable. The trick is to remember the funny parts (words of wisdom).

The Warner Archive CollectionBlu-ray of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is the expected pristine copy of this early ’70s item. It carries an original ‘First Artists’ logo, that uses prehistoric computer-generated images to manipulate a line drawing of the four filmmaker profiles (one is Barbra Streisand). The naturalistic lighting by Richard Moore doesn’t go in for too many pretty pictures, and interiors can be rather drab. The main title design by Willard B. Scott is quite handsome, though. When Bad Bob gets his just desserts, the film uses a cartoonish zoom-in optical that we thought was hilarious back in ’72.

Maurice Jarre’s music is a pleasure to hear, even if the main theme seems familiar from something else. Yes, that damn song was nominated for an Oscar. The winner was ‘The Morning After’ from The Poseidon Adventure.

John Milius must have been enchanted by the casting, for Life and Times abounds with his future personnel: stunt director Terry Leonard, actors Steve Kanaly and Roy Jenson. Neil Summers is especially good in a bit as a braggart cowboy that foolishly takes a shot at a poster of Lily Langtree. Michael Sarrazin makes a photo-only appearance, and another artwork poster gives Milius the opportunity mention his favorite president, Teddy Roosevelt. Identical references and themes running through multiple feature films — equals — instant auteur!

In 1972 and ’73 I roomed in Westwood with fellow film student/future screenwriter Steve Sharon. We were western-crazy and saw everything. Overall the new westerns seen in Westwood didn’t impress us the way the older films did, but what could compete with the fantastic perfect prints of the John Ford classics, etc., being shown up in the film school? I walked out of the soporific Wild Rovers, suffered through The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing and Chisum, and simply avoided El Topo. John Milius’ Jeremiah Johnson was okay, Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller wonderful, Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid scary as hell. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean came across as a somewhat murky diversion, while we thought Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (in its short form) a total mess. I guess we were film school snobs. I preferred to go see The Wild Bunch for the 20th time!

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-life-and-times-of-judge-roy-bean/feed/7https://trailersfromhell.com/the-life-and-times-of-judge-roy-bean/Footsteps in the Foghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/_H5WTlpMnMM/
https://trailersfromhell.com/footsteps-in-the-fog/#commentsTue, 31 Jul 2018 20:52:49 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34514 Could this be retitled “Dial ‘F’ for Fog?” Jean Simmon’s greedy maid blackmails her employer Stewart Granger with proof that he murdered his wife, kicking off a criminal ‘deadlock’ in a London household. The cold-fish schemer Granger ponders his next murderous move while Simmons enjoys playing the lady of the house — having dared...

Could this be retitled “Dial ‘F’ for Fog?” Jean Simmon’s greedy maid blackmails her employer Stewart Granger with proof that he murdered his wife, kicking off a criminal ‘deadlock’ in a London household. The cold-fish schemer Granger ponders his next murderous move while Simmons enjoys playing the lady of the house — having dared to leapfrog two social classes, she hopes that her victim will respond with kindness, not homicide. This gothic domestic murder tale should be required reading for marriage counselors.

Indicator reaches in a sideways direction in the Columbia vault to access this sedate, refined chamber piece about nasty Londoners scheming and murdering to their hearts’ delight. The UK co-production captures Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger in the middle of their decade-long marriage, acting together as a couple entangled in deception, blackmail and murder. They’re both attractive, but very dangerous.

The engaging Footsteps in the Fog is a twist-mystery from W.W. Jacobs, the author of the timeless tale The Monkey’s Paw. Well-to-do Stephen Lowry (Stewart Granger) buries his wife and goes into mourning, or so his friends think — he’s really congratulating himself for having successfully poisoned the woman. Given an important job by Alfred Travers (Ronald Squire), Stephen has every intention of wooing Travers’ gorgeous daughter Elizabeth (Belinda Lee) away from her boyfriend, attorney David MacDonald (Bill Travers). What Stephen doesn’t realize is that his maid Lily Watkins (Jean Simmons) has proof of his poisoning, and has cooked up her own plan to take over his household, and his life. As she can no longer be fired, Lily appropriates the dead wife’s jewelry and clothing, has the other servants dismissed and claims Stephen as her lover. Not the kind of man to tolerate having his destiny spoiled by a second woman, Stephen plays along with Lily’s game. When a dark, foggy night comes along he follows her into the mist, with murder in mind.

It’s good clean English fun in a classic vein — our hero is a posh blaggard and our heroine a vicious liar, thief and blackmailer. The fact that each independently figures they can cheat their way into financial security AND love makes them perfect fools, the kind that bring unhappiness down on all around them.

Printed in Technicolor, Footsteps in the Fog’s tale of petty skullduggery plays out in beautiful Wilfrid Shingleton sets. The fun of such old-fashioned stories is the way all those pretty housefronts and period costumes hide so much fiendish behavior. Ten years previous, Stewart Granger prospered acting in various Gainsborough melodramas about lusty women and black-hearted men. Fog doesn’t go in for flamboyant Gainsborough stylistics, preferring to stay low-key and darkly menacing. The way our well-matched villains are trapped by their own schemes is somewhat mechanical, but it works well enough. A couple of years later, Hammer Films would bring Gainsborough production values and storytelling panache to revitalize the horror genre. Fog sticks with the older gothic values as seen in various ‘evil husband’ stories like Gaslight. Its special appeal is that the romantic angle is swapped out for a cruel parody of a marriage devoid of trust or love. The second half of the show is an interesting set of reversals and narrative twists by which justice is finally served.

The excellent Jean Simmons has never had problems with contradictory characters — and scored with an excellent portrayal of a female psychopath, the irresistible, lethal Diane Tremayne in the classic Preminger noir Angel Face. Lily Watkins is the anti- Eliza Doolittle, a scullery maid who seizes her chance to rise by trickery and deceit. Lily knows that the social system is an unjust fraud, and doesn’t hesitate to steal her piece of the pie. She’s just crazy enough to think that a man like Stephen Lowry can be coerced into loving her.

Stewart Granger never projected much beyond the surface of his characters and he’s a lot less exciting here. Heartless creeps in similar domestic murder shows are often charm personified — think Ray Milland in Dial ‘M’ for Murder. We often indulge these cads, secretly wanting them to get away with their crimes. Not so with Stephen Lowry, who woos the boss’s daughter while scheming to rid himself of Lily. I won’t spoil the plotline’s clever reversals: a second murder, a trial and criss-crossing intrigues. Even with these Grade A, O. Henry- quality plot twists, the finale is muted because we have so little sympathy for Granger’s villain.

Producer Mike Frankovich ran Columbia’s operations in London. He personally produced at least one film a year, and this was probably his biggest picture of the time. Around 1965 he took the helm of Columbia for a spell. In the ’70s he’d re-establish himself as the producer of big hits like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

American director Arthur Lubin would seem to be a bad match for this film material, as he was known almost exclusively for mid-range comedies. We’re told that both Granger and Simmons didn’t like being directed by a man who just came from a Francis the Talking Mule movie. Lubin’s glossy Phantom of the Opera remake is neither a classic nor a director’s showcase. He also directed the one Burt Lancaster picture that really doesn’t bear watching, South Sea Woman. For Fog the story is everything. Scenes are played straight and formal, minus stylistic touches. Even with the rich color cinematography, the only really arresting image is the sight of Simmons’ Lily, revealed having dressed up in one of her former mistress’s fancy evening gowns.

The classy English cast is mostly decorative. Belinda Lee’s pretty Elizabeth is taken in by the dishonest Stephen, while Bill Travers’ observant lawyer David is dismissed as a jealous suitor. It doesn’t matter that David has seen Lily wearing the dead wife’s jewelry (a riff given dramatic power in Hitchcock’s Vertigo). To prove his sincerity, David must defend Stephen at an inquest.

Barry Keegan’s character (no details here) ought to have a larger role, but the great William Hartnell (Brighton Rock, Appointment with Crime) has a nice bit as a lowlife relation of Lily’s who tries to go after some reward money. Aside from these bright bits and Jean Simmons’ excellent performance, the fun in Footsteps in the Fog will simply be seeing its clever story unspool — it’s not unlike an extended episode of TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Powerhouse Indicator’s Blu-ray of Footsteps in the Fog is a solid encoding of this color & widescreen show from the mid-50s. One scene is less sharp, as if it had to be taken from a different film element, and some optical dissolve transitions show signs of misalignment color fringing. Most of the show looks very, very good. HD resolution helps out all of those fogbound scenes, that’s for sure; Powerhouse has a reputation for maximizing the bit rate, sometimes gives them the edge over competing product.

In lieu of a commentary we’re given a lengthy ‘Guardian’ audio interview with Stewart Granger. The lively video extras include pieces by BFI curator Josephine Botting, and this year’s most prolific newcomer to disc commentaries, Kat Ellinger. Steve Chibnall hosts a look at the short career of Belinda Lee. Powerhouse’s fat insert booklet has informative essays by Chibnall, including a comparison with the W.W. Jacobs story.

It’s interesting to read about this chapter in Mike Frankovich’s career. With Robert S. Birchard, I projected movies for Frankovich and his wife Binnie Barnes at their house in Beverly Hills, and at his offices at Sunset and Doheny. Working for them was easy as long as one understood the rules of behavior around Old Hollywood royalty. I never had a conversation with him beyond finding out what movie he wanted to see, among the ones delivered to his screening room.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Footsteps in the FogBlu-rayrates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Very Good
Sound: Very Good
Supplements: BFI curator Josephine Botting speaks about ‘Something in the Air’ (2018), an exploration of Hollywood’s fascination with Victorian England; Steve Chibnall on Belinda Lee (2018) is self explanatory; and Kat Ellinger traces Gothic Footprints (2018). Plus a trailer, still gallery; and illustrated booklet.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: July 30, 2018(5789fog)

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/footsteps-in-the-fog/feed/4https://trailersfromhell.com/footsteps-in-the-fog/The Mortal Stormhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/71eFWFHtsb0/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-mortal-storm/#respondMon, 30 Jul 2018 04:00:52 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34506Too close for comfort, Frank Borzage’s 1940 drama reunites the stars of The Shop Around the Corner, James Stewart, Margret Sullavan and Frank Morgan, in far more ominous circumstances – the overthrow of Germany by fascist rule. One of the first Hollywood “resistance” films, the movie features Father Knows Best star Robert Young as an up and...

]]>Too close for comfort, Frank Borzage’s 1940 drama reunites the stars of The Shop Around the Corner, James Stewart, Margret Sullavan and Frank Morgan, in far more ominous circumstances – the overthrow of Germany by fascist rule. One of the first Hollywood “resistance” films, the movie features Father Knows Best star Robert Young as an up and coming Nazi.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-mortal-storm/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/the-mortal-storm/Eat Me – Animal House at 40http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/b2nsWm0hzlI/
https://trailersfromhell.com/eat-me-animal-house-at-40/#commentsSun, 29 Jul 2018 23:06:51 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34489“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests. We did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the...

]]>“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests. We did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational systems in general? I put it to you, Greg— isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you bad-mouth the United States of America!”

— Eric “Otter” Stratton, ’63, Gynecologist, Beverly Hills, California

******************************************************

Forty years ago, on July 28, 1978, National Lampoon’s Animal House was unleashed upon the world. A modest, low-budgeted comedy in which its own studio, Universal Pictures, held little faith, it quickly became not only a well-reviewed hit, for a time the highest-grossing comedy in US box-office history, but a genuine cultural phenomenon which inspired a tidal wave of on-and-off-campus food fights, toga parties and general collegiate misbehavior, as well as a seemingly endless parade of movie comedies strung out over the following four decades that would strive to duplicate (with wildly variant degrees of success, of course) its underdogs-vs.-the establishment formula and unapologetically anarchic spirit.

Later this month, in Eugene, Oregon, there’s a 40th-anniversary toga party-centric celebration of the movie being staged to mark the occasion, headed up by the movie’s local casting director, Katherine Wilson, and others who participated in the filming of Animal House on and about the campus of the University of Oregon, many of whom still live in and about that community. But other than a recent onstage cast reunion at the Turner Classic Film Festival, where the movie played to a packed house of nearly 1,000 audience members, who laughed as if it were still 1978, there hasn’t been a whole lot heard from Universal or the press to celebrate Animal House’s 40th birthday, certainly nothing comparable to the reception it received—multiple cast reunions, newspaper articles, a features-packed anniversary DVD, et al.—when it turned 30.

Could they be nervous? The situation is that the 40th anniversary of the release of National Lampoon’s Animal House is occurring during a time when many modern collegiate viewers are looking back on the movie through self-corrective lenses provided by a society of social arbiters who want to insist that art (yes, I used the words “art” and “Animal House” in the same sentence) not be truly representative—that is, voicing opinions, perspectives and notions of propriety they may not be comfortable with which coexist with the ones they feel no hesitation in endorsing.

Yesterday, the current affairs website Vice published a finger-wagging takedown of the movie’s perceived sins of cultural insensitivity entitled “Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Animal House by Tossing It in the Trash.”(The piece’s subheading: “Drunken frat boys don’t seem so charming anymore, and the film’s gender politics are fucked beyond repair.”) The headline and subheading tell you everything you need to know about the piece, written in an unsurprisingly condescending tone by one Harry Cheadle, but it’s worth noting a couple of Cheadle’s observations for the way in which they reflect and attempt to instruct upon the proper way to assess and compartmentalize an “artifact” like Animal House.

First on the writer’s checklist, Cheadle makes much hay of the “boring” use of nudity, especially in the scene in which Bluto spies on a sorority through an upstairs window which, according to him, only horny 14-year-old boys would respond to. (To which I can only respond, “Thank you, God!”) Cheadle also wants to point out that the only “sympathetic” characters in the film are Katy (Karen Allen), the uber-patient girlfriend of Boone, one of the senior Deltas, or perhaps some of the other women exploited by the film’s protagonists. He also notes, with exceeding generosity, that “At one point, one of our heroes thinks about molesting (a) 13-year-old while she sleeps, but decides not to.”

It will undoubtedly come as news to Cheadle and anyone else armed and ready to topple the statue of Emil Faber which stands in the center of the Faber College quad, but movie history is rife with examples of men and women ogling each other’s unclothed or partially unclothed bodies, and often not with the added benefit of a fourth-wall-breaking visual joke which ties Belushi’s oversexed voyeurism with our own. But that, like Animal House itself, I suppose, is just history.

Cheadle’s noting of the exploitation of Animal House’s secondary female characters reads less like honest concern, or even fair representation of what’s actually on screen in terms of the characters and how they are presented, than the scribbling of someone slightly more worried than he should be about staying on the correct side of the current cultural debate about “fucked-up gender politics.” Cheadle offhandedly tries to score points in favor of his thesis by noting Karen Allen’s comment, made during a recent interview about the film, that “You cringe at (Animal House), but it’s an interesting kind of cringe.” The writer, apparently too absorbed in the sensation of rubbing his goatee in contemplation, forgets to add the rest of Allen’s comment: “What’s great about the film is that it really makes fun of everybody.” (Italics mine, all mine.) Best to forget that last part, I suppose, within a brave, humorless polemic like Cheadle’s.

All this is, of course, to completely ignore the presence of Dean Wormer’s wife (Verna Bloom), hardly a victim in her own extramarital sexual escapades with Otter (Tim Matheson) Delta Tau Chi’s rush chairman and resident playboy. (Except, of course, when the dean, in retaliation, has her shipped off to Sarasota Springs for a “vacation.”) And finally, it seems to escape Cheadle’s eagle eye that during the moment in which Pinto (Tom Hulce) decides not to “molest” the 13-year-old Clorette (Sarah Holcomb), he believes her to be a college-aged girl. Pinto only sleeps with her after she confesses to him that’s she’s deceived him about her age—how’s that for offensive? Again, the joke is on Pinto—he’s been played like the horny freshman he is. But while harvested for a laugh, the ensuing situation, however clearly a case of legally-defined statutory rape, hardly qualifies as a National Lampoon primer on how to bang underage chicks and get away with it. (Our last sight of Pinto is of the offender fleeing the violent clutches of Mayor Carmine DiPasto, Clorette’s bad-tempered and clearly mob-connected father. Calling the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League!)

The Deltas visit to the Dexter Lake Club is the nexus of the critical case against Animal House in terms of race relations, as Cheadle and others have been quick to point out. In anotherequally depressing piece published in the most recent issue of Oregon Quarterly, “The Magazine of the University of Oregon,” Jason Stone, “staff writer for University Communications,” notes how the movie “mines uncomfortable humor from racist stereotypes” during the Dexter Lake Club sequence. The scene, in case you claim, as do both these writers, to not have seen it for decades or to have almost entirely forgotten it in the pursuit of more worthwhile endeavors, involves the Deltas transporting their dates (obtained through an awful, and awfully funny, bit of deception involving an obituary and a kiln explosion) to the Dexter Lake Club in pursuit of their favorite Negro bar band, Otis Day and the Knights. Earlier in the picture, of course, OD&TK provide the soundtrack for the Deltas’ infamous (and almost quaintly tame, as measured by the 21st-century bar) toga party, where Boone (Peter Reigert) can be spotted wearing dark sunglasses and sitting apart from the dancers, instead positioning himself on a stool, facing the party alongside the band, visibly soaking up their cool and occasionally shouting “Otis!” And now Boone shouts again— “Otis! He loves us!”—as he leads their group, including their unsuspecting dates, into a roadhouse dive packed with, well, Folks Who Don’t Look Like Them. (“We’re the only white people here,” Pinto whispers to Boone, stating the obvious with hushed, deadpan desperation.)

Cheadle, as part of his dismantling project for Vice, mentions that no less than Richard Pryor blessed and anointed the movie, including this scene of the Deltas’ squirming and sweating amongst the black patrons within the leopard skin-lined confines of the Dexter Lake Club. According to an oral history about the movie published in The New York Times in May 2018, Pryor sent a note to the head of the studio who, according to the film’s director, John Landis, was convinced the scene would cause “riots across America.” The great comedian proclaimed in the note that “Animal House was [expletive] funny, and white people are crazy.” That’s a particularly telling comment not only because of the knowledge of Pryor’s own incendiary way with approaching racial politics in his stand-up comedy, but because it provides a clue to the true perspective of the scene itself. Unfortunately, the observation holds little water for Cheadle, who thinks Pryor’s commentary occurred too far in the past to have any relevance for today’s viewers.

It will surprise no one, except perhaps the likes of Cheadle and Stone, that the actual butts of most of the humor in the Dexter Lake Club scene are the Deltas themselves and their misguided attempt to crash an insular social situation which in 1962 naturally would not have welcomed them with open arms. The Deltas, Boone in particular, are targets in a satirical jab over what amounts to cultural appropriation— they want the cool associated with Negro culture by making a show of bopping along with Otis Day, dipping their toes in for a double rock and rye and seven Carlings, and then running for the safety of the frat house when they get called on their game. (Outraged charges have yet to besiege Landis’s follow-up, 1980’s The Blues Brothers, the movie that much more thoroughly follows through on and fulfills the cultural appropriation “crimes” satirized in Animal House, a fact which might have something to do with the glow emitting from all those supremely talented Black folk with which Landis, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd surround themselves.)

The one joke in the Dexter Lake Club scene that lands perilously close to indefensible is the cut from Emily Dickinson College’s Brunella (Eliza Garrett), as she announces her major– Primitive Cultures– directly to Otis Day vocalizing the “Ooh-mau-mau” refrain from “Shama Lama Ding Dong.” Perhaps a step too far even for a movie which, as Allen insisted, makes fun of everybody. (Who’s equating primitive cultures and Otis Day? Not Brunella.) But even if it is too much, the joke is no more justification for a green light to scrub National Lampoon’s Animal House from our cultural history than would be Groucho Marx’s racist crack in Duck Soup for getting rid of all traces of that classic film. (Groucho’s joke, “My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born,” is a reference to/jab at Kate Smith’s 1931 recording of a popular song entitled “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” which some claim to be a joke on racism, but which never fails to inspire crickets among modern audiences who are engulfed in laughter for the rest of the movie’s 68 minutes. As a time traveler Kate Smith doesn’t travel well.)

As for politics, Animal House clearly stood not only as a refutation of the innocence myth of American society, in which we’re all supposed to believe that the United States existed in some sort of pristine bubble of purity until Kennedy was assassinated (or until whatever other awful or even trivial political development occurred which you might want to slot in there instead), but as a refutation of the cynicism of the fallout caused by Nixonian politics from which it emerged in 1978. But Cheadle would rather twist the tried-and-true framing of the movie’s central conflict for the sake of a smarmy retort than actually think about what establishment, what swamp, is being attacked by the movie:

“The slobs vs. snobs dynamic seems dated, especially with one particularly nasty slob now running the country and doing a pretty bad job of it. (It makes you nostalgic for the previous generation of country club asshole, who were at least better read.)”

If he’s suggesting that there’s a fundamental social and political difference between Donald J. Trump and, say, Caddyshack’s Judge Smalls, the closest and most primary descendant of the reactionary evil of Dean Wormer, well, then I’d say Cheadle ought to heed the Faber College motto, “Knowledge is Good,” and get himself some right quick.

Cheadle’s holier-than-thou tirade is pretty much par for the course in a culture hellbent on turning the sentiments of liberal politics, once based in freedom of expression and the liberation from confining attitudes to which everyone is expected to subscribe, into hardscrabble conservative dogma about what can and cannot be tolerated in art and culture. It’s a pitiful move which seeks out a roadmap for social behavior and acceptance in art rather than a forum for posing questions and thoughtfully considering them, one which presumes that movies are to be used as guideposts along life’s highways and not as a means for gaining understanding of experience through independent thought. It’s clear what Cheadle thinks about the frat boys in Animal House who behave outside the margins of proper behavior. I wonder what he makes of folks like, I don’t know, the aimless youths ofBande à part, or the familial gangsters of The Godfather, or the ruthless killers who compose the worn heart of The Wild Bunch. Are these also movies to be shunned because their characters exhibit behavior which society in our enlightened times would find “inappropriate?”

So where does Cheadle’s nonsense lead him? Quick. Remind yourself of the title of Cheadle’s piece. And then read his final, withering paragraph:

“We could never wipe Animal House from the face of the earth even if we wanted to; its influence is too vast, and its best jokes are justifiable classics. So put the movie on a pedestal, induct it into whatever hall of fame, move it into a museum, fine. You know who visits museums? Nobody.”

“Even if we wanted to.” And it sure sounds like folks like Cheadle want to, if for no other reason that they can continue to pretend they’ve got it all over the unenlightened cretins who came before and left the world in such a fucked-up state. And if you’re not wasting time watching cinematic stains like Animal House, why, that’s all the more time to spend, like Cheadle, not going to museums or availing oneself of any of the other cultural opportunities one might have at one’s disposal. Unless they’ve been previously approved by whatever committee or social movement programs your thinking at the moment, of course.

But as frustrating as Cheadle’s point of view is, I have to say I found Stone’s fence-straddling in the Oregon Quarterly article, entitled “Animal House: Still Funny at Age 40?” just as dispiriting. This is a piece that seems like a J. Edgar Hoover-commissioned hit job, its foregone conclusion prescribed by the dean’s office, or perhaps by the wet-noodle head professor of the Cinema Studies department, who openly frames the perspective of the piece early on:

“`Over the years, as the film endured and grew in local legend it also became an acknowledged part of Oregon culture and the brand of the university,’ notes Michael Aronson, head of the Department of Cinema Studies… `The problem is, the film is bad, really bad… It might be fondly remembered if you haven’t watched it in 30 years, but Animal House is awful; wildly misogynistic, homophobic, and racist.’”

This arrogant quote from a man in a position of power to condition and guide a generation of students to a greater understanding of the power and possibilities of film art (or any other kind), and the way he shuts down all discussion with loaded catch words without bothering (and this may be thanks to Stone and his editors as well) to articulate his claims, gives me chills. And Stone, the dutiful reporter, marches right along under the professor’s guiding principle, accepting claims about the movie, its subject and context, without much investigation. According to Caitlin Roberts, the UO’s director of fraternity and sorority life, “The film does not represent what fraternities were founded on or what our organizations are truly about.” This is an argument that sounds suspiciously akin to the one proffered by Greek system representatives at Oregon in 1977, when the movie was being proposed to school administrators and they were actively protesting the university’s involvement, an argument from which they quickly backed away once the movie became a local phenomenon during the fall of 1977 and then a national one a year later. If Animal House doesn’t represent the lofty ideals or intentions of the Greek system, that’s sort of the point— it’s much closer to another puncturing of the official tidal wave of self-aggrandizing bullshit with which institutions like universities and their social substrata frequently cloak themselves.

And, of course, the reaction of a student audience Stone observed watching Animal House was predictably tepid:

“They thought the plot was overstuffed and unstructured, and too much of the dialogue hinged on insults. They were critical of the gratuitous nudity. More than one viewer described the film as ‘old-fashioned’—an ominous sign with regards to any media artifact’s prospect for longevity. More ominous still, ‘overrated.’ And finally, the judgment that is most gravely portentous for anything intended to be timeless comedy: ‘Not all that funny.’”

Overstuffed? Unstructured?. Too many insults? Well, it’s true that Moliere and Oscar Wilde weren’t available when the script was being written. And God forbid anything be perceived as “old-fashioned,” which, as we all know, is the soul killer of the artistic endeavor, to say nothing of it being a huge obstacle to overcome in terms of a work’s longevity. Because the truly enduring works are those which haven’t had the misfortune of being tainted by time and its peculiar habit of sealing the attitudes, rhythms, presumptions and occasional artistic revelations of the people who made them in celluloid amber. And if I may clear my throat here, isn’t it rather boneheaded to presume that anyone, from Leo McCarey and the Marx Brothers, to Preston Sturges, to Billy Wilder, to Mel Brooks or Harold Ramis or the Farrelly Brothers or anyone else, is necessarily shooting for “timeless” comedy? No, they’re shooting for laughs, plenty of which were in evidence when I saw Animal House with 1,000 other people at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood this past spring, people who also happened to be ignorant of the sealed-off proclamations of the esteemed and surely wise professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon.

Of course, as the professor says, if it’s not all that funny, then into the trash bin of history it goes. Fuck it.

If I could, I’d like to hand the last word in this long rebuttal to what I consider essentially an anti-art argument over to a couple voices of reason and sanity who I’ve communicated with more than once on this issue, both of whom seem to have crystallized the rebuttal in a way that is far beyond the capabilities of my logorrheic self. First, in reaction to Cheadle’s nonsense, my friend Christopher Atwell, a very wise, considered fellow who also knows his way around the subject and application of good humor, wrote this on Facebook:

“These SJ W modern lens articles… always arrive at the unspectacular conclusion that old movies fail to reflect our current woke attitudes. No shit. The writer’s prescription– to “throw it in the trash”– is more small minded, stupid, and worthless than the worst offending old movie. The only thing these writers seem to offer today is, “Can you believe how sexist/racist/homophobic people used to be?” That’s not news. Contextualize the work, glean its meaning, have the imagination to maybe try to understand what it reveals about the world that produced it. And if the damn thing is funny, don’t feel you need to clear it with the culture police in order to laugh.”

He continues:

“Just to belabor the point further, by contemporary woke standards, the universe of cartoon shorts is `problematic’ AF. Not just the overtly racist ones the studios have locked away, but a great many of the popular ones. And for a million reasons! All that getting shot in the face. All the ethnic humor. The disability jokes. The gay jokes. Everything. But they are glorious art. Hilarious as the day they were made. And revisiting them with my children proved to be one of the joys of parenting. Am I worried about polluting my kids with negative attitudes and old prejudices? No, because their mother and I are not raising morons. I’m arrogant enough to believe that (our) values are of greater importance to their development than Daffy Duck’s. I realize now I grew up in a totally irresponsible era. Films were all the better for it.”

And from the great wit of cultural critic and all-around good guy Phillip Dyess-Nugent comes this:

“I have just encountered the argument that Grand Illusion cannot be a great movie because its sympathetic view of its aristocratic characters compromises its wokeness. I am now going to go to Montana and live off the grid. If anyone approaches my door, I will shoot them and feed their bodies to the pigs that I will be working to cross-breed with chickens. When I die at the age of 112, surrounded by the cats I will have taught to communicate in Morse code and to play the stock market, I will have no idea what is going on in your so-called ‘civilized world,’ but I will be the only person who has ever tasted or will ever taste my delicious deep-fried porkchicken chops.”

Thank you, gentlemen. For myself, I have only two words further in defense of National Lampoon’s Animal House or any other movie that ends up in the crosshairs of this particularly disturbing moment in the decline of our culture, words from the movie itself which are emblematic both of its valuable anarchic spirit and the sentiment I hold for pieces like the ones which have caused my blood pressure to spike on this day, the 40th anniversary of a comedy classic. The two words? EAT ME.

Though Hemingway suggested “all modern American literature” comes from Huckleberry Finn, a case could be made for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as the great American campfire tale.

David Selznick’s picaresque film version of Mark Twain’s bucolic farce plays out through the producer’s rose-colored glasses – an elegy to “the beautiful past, the dear and lamented past.” The brisk adaptation by screenwriter John Weaver (only 91 minutes) is a laundry list of Tom’s greatest hits – his graveyard vigil with Huck Finn, the pirate escapade, the hair-raising cavern finale – all are adventures ingrained in the collective unconscious of most sentient human beings – even those who never cracked a book.

Directed by Norman Taurog, a man who specialized in the kind of uncomplicated entertainment usually described as “breezy”, and photographed in delicate Technicolor tones by James Wong Howe, Selznick’s pastoral comedy is nothing if not cheerful – but it was produced under a cloud of backstage drama and the fussy Selznick, no surprise, was the instigator for most of it.

The dysfunctional production was chaperoned by as many directors as The Wizard of Oz – including William Wellman, George Cukor and H.C. Potter – and endured an everchanging cast list running through three Aunt Pollys, two Huck Finns and two Tom Sawyers. Howe himself engaged in daily skirmishes with Technicolor cameraman Wilfred Cline (the cinematographer was aiming for a subtle palette) and didn’t make another color film till 1950’s The Eagle and the Hawk.

Cooler heads prevailed and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer arrived in 1938 with Tommy Kelly as Tom, May Robson as his perpetually disappointed Aunt Polly, Marcia Mae Jones as his serenely beautiful cousin Mary, David Jones as his mealy-mouthed half-brother Sid and Ann Gillis as the sweet but high-strung Becky Thatcher.

A vivid supporting cast, including Olin Howland as the sadistic schoolmaster, Walter Brennan as the addlepated Muff Potter and Victor Jory as the demonic Injun Joe, personified the notion of “local color”.

Tom’s rascally ways don’t interfere with his kindly nature – his best friend is Huck Finn, the town’s untamed outcast, and it’s their uncanny ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time that put them at the scene of a graveside murder. The grisly spectacle sets the plot in motion and leads to a terrifying underground pursuit leaving both Tom and Huck hometown heroes and abruptly wealthy.

Selznick naturally availed himself of Hollywood’s finest when it came to his crew, bringing in heavy hitters like Kong composer Max Steiner for the soundtrack and the brilliant Walter Plunkett (running the gamut from Forbidden Planet to King Solomon’s Mines) as the costume designer – even with all this firepower the film is almost excessively modest in its demeanor, sometimes resembling a beautifully photographed Our Gang short (that is not a bad thing).

Selznick’s greatest inspiration was in recruiting William Cameron Menzies as storyboard artist and unofficial director of the film’s climatic cave sequence. The longtime production designer’s hand is obvious in the stark imagery of the boneyard murder with the dastardly deed playing out in silhouette atop a craggy hilltop – but Menzies’ coup de grâce is the heart-stopping pursuit through the cavern up and down the perilously steep walls and bottomless pits – it’s the very definition of a cliffhanger.

Though much of Twain’s more acerbic humor is missing, the film ends in shockingly funny fashion as Aunt Polly unleashes a devastating, and well-deserved, right hook – a moment that inspires spit-takes and belly laughs to this day.

Fans of this enormously charming brand of nostalgia – the yearning for what never was – have long hankered for Tom’s exploits to find a proper presentation on home video. It was worth the wait – Kino Lorber’s new Blu ray release is a beauty – the transfer of Howe’s exquisite work is sublime, revealing (at last) the remarkable details in clothing, set design and every knick knack on the Sawyer family mantle.

There are no extras but the disc includes includes both the original 91-minute cut and the 77-minute reissue.

The above painting of Tom whitewashing the fence (and hoodwinking his friends) and the schoolroom scene to the left are by Norman Rockwell from the 1936 edition of the Twain classic. More can be found here.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer/The Revolt of Mamie Stoverhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/Bw7Cm34boJg/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-revolt-of-mamie-stover/#commentsSat, 28 Jul 2018 16:38:58 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34481 Now it can be told! Or maybe, now it can’t be told? William Bradford Huie’s novel of creeping American ambition in Honolulu ends up as a tame vehicle for Jane Russell, who in one of her last big starring movies gives the Hawaiian scenery a run for its money. Raoul Walsh does well in...

Now it can be told! Or maybe, now it can’t be told? William Bradford Huie’s novel of creeping American ambition in Honolulu ends up as a tame vehicle for Jane Russell, who in one of her last big starring movies gives the Hawaiian scenery a run for its money. Raoul Walsh does well in the direction department, but the story has been cleaned up for Sunday School.

What became of strong novels with ‘things to say’ after Hollywood ran them through the Production Code Office? William Bradford Huie wrote some fierce words about the war and American morals in both this book and his novel The Americanization of Emily. Paddy Chayefsky kept some of Huie’s ideas alive for the Emily film adaptation, but the more downbeat The Revolt of Mamie Stover was wrung through the Production Code wringer, losing its hard edge and some unflattering observations about wartime profiteering. What we’re left with is a good romance, with great scenery and a ‘different’ look at the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. But that title is a real winner, no argument there.

It’s probably best to begin with Raoul Walsh’s movie, produced by Buddy Adler in color and CinemaScope. It’s sometime in 1941. Late at night in San Francisco, Mamie Stover (Jane Russell) is put on a freighter out of town, heading for Honolulu. Mamie opens up to the only other passenger, writer and Honolulu native Jim Blair (Richard Egan), who learns of her trouble with the police, and that she’s going to work in a Honolulu dance club and clip joint called The Bungalow. A poor girl from Mississippi, Mamie isn’t interested in Jim’s help to secure a quiet, honest job, as she plans to get as much cash as she can as fast as she can, as to buy her way into respectability. Although the girls at The Bungalow live under the iron fist of the hardened owner Bertha Parchman (Agnes Moorehead) and her sinister strongarm man Harry Adkins (Michael Pate), Mamie manages to sneak out to see Jim. She returns the money he loaned her but continually talks about how she’s going to earn enough to live on a hill with the quality people. Billed as ‘Flaming Mamie,’ Stover soon has a bankroll put away.

Jim has already defected from his girlfriend Annalee Johnson (Joan Leslie) and is almost ready to propose marriage to Mamie, when Pearl Harbor is attacked and war breaks out. He enlists in the Army, while Mamie decides to get rich by buying real estate from people afraid of a Japanese invasion. Jim gets Mamie to promise to stop working while he’s gone, but Bertha cuts her star attraction such a good deal that she stays on at the club. Mamie doesn’t fall for the Captain (Richard Coogan) who tries to monopolize her free time, but Jim finds out about her work anyway, when another soldier shares pinups he’s bought. Will Jim and Mamie remain an item?

In James Jones novel From Here to Eternity the soldiers on Oahu take their pleasures at the Congress Club, a Honolulu brothel that remains open by keeping up outward appearances. The same producer Buddy Adler had to perform diplomatic backflips to secure Army cooperation for his movie version. The Fred Zinnemann movie turned the brothel into a ‘social club’ where soldiers simply spent their time dancing and chatting with girls. It was the basic Rite of Sanitization by the Production Code, through which American culture took on a veneer of hypocritical denial — our boys, our soldiers, just didn’t do such bad things.

So Mamie Stover’s big sin is simply being a dime-a-dance girl, in an establishment that enforces rules making it nearly impossible for them to see customers outside the premises. Bertha’s girls are not allowed in the hotels or on the beaches, and they can’t date. The setup just isn’t credible, as the GIs that flock to the club do so just for the privilege of buying expensive watered down champagne and sitting with women in private rooms. The most eager of the clients spends a fortune to see his girl, just to watch her beat him in card games. Are we supposed to imagine that more happens in the private rooms?

The advertising tagline is “Why Did Mamie Stover Have to Leave San Francisco?” but the movie never tells us the answer. Just being seen in a nice hotel causes trouble for the flashy, socially unacceptable Mamie. This only makes sense if The Bungalow is a brothel, so the movie’s logic is crippled from the start.

Sydney Boehm’s adapted screenplay has the nerve to force Mamie to listen to lectures from a rich guy who lives on the hill. After Pearl Harbor, plenty of nervous property owners sold out to return to the States, in a buyer’s market. The movie condemns Mamie for being an avaricious war profiteer, in a climate that invited profiteering. The war ended with a 300 percent increase in millionaires that received awards for patriotism. Mamie’s worship of money is considered something terrible, and the only reason seems to be that she’s a woman leading a personal revolt against the system that oppresses her.

Author William Bradford Huie repeatedly found powerful stories to tell, as in his source contribution to the superlative Elia Kazan film Wild River. Descriptions of his Mamie Stover book explain that it critiques American culture by showing that even a lowly prostitute could grow rich and powerful due to the ‘democratization’ of values during wartime. Thanks to the availability of good jobs in wartime industries, the ignorant poor and racial minorities previously subject to discrimination were able to get a leg up, creating a much larger middle class. In the book, the key must be the word Revolt. Mamie is a beautiful, motivated woman who rattles all the doors locked to her. When she fails as a Hollywood starlet, she resorts to prostitution. The movie resorts to the old fairy tale in which a woman tries to get ahead, breaks various conventions, and must of course be punished. The ending of the movie is more than a little depressing. Mamie doesn’t so much atone for her sins, as she simply accepts the game that is rigged against her.

An IMDB trivia page lists a purported number of editorial changes imposed on the movie. A key scene dropped is an opening in which Mamie is picked up by a man right on the street in San Francisco, making it crystal clear that she’s a prostitute. Besides cleaning up the picture, the changes would seem to make Mamie seem less superficial and venal. An imposed final scene suggests that she has turned ‘good.’ In the original ending, the IMDB says she continues in Honolulu as a high-priced clip-joint Jezebel.

Most everything else about The Revolt of Mamie Stover clicks nicely into place. Jane Russell plays a hardened dame quite well; from some angles her face is warm and friendly, whereas her hatchet-like profile makes her look angry. Russell carries Mamie as a classy showgirl, and eventually becomes a singer in the club. Her main song, ‘Keep Your Eyes on the Hands’ is an old joke with hula performances, but also links up with Ms. Russell’s previous image promoted by Howard Hughes. A professional record is made of a song about Mamie, indicating that she’s something of a hot-cha celebrity. Jim Blair’s relationship with Mamie is really an indictment of the old Double Standard. Yes, she works in a somewhat disreputable club, but Jim’s complaints only make sense if she’s hooking on the side, and she’s not. That mires the movie down in the fundamentalist notion that dictates that women shouldn’t work, period.

The undervalued Richard Egan comes across quite well as Jim, the writer too ethical to stay in Hollywood. We’re told he’s a successful writer, and considering his posh lair in the Honolulu hills, we’d have to assume that he comes from money. Jim immediately signs up as an enlisted man after Pearl Harbor. Fair enough, except that he seems to expect Mamie to do nothing. Egan and Russell make a handsome couple, as he looks big enough and man enough to take her on. Therefore it seems a shame for them not to stay together.

Raoul Walsh would direct eight more movies, all competent but none a classic. He may have asked Joan Leslie from his High Sierra to play the thankless role of Jim’s purebred girlfriend. Although she’d do a lot of TV work for the next 35 years, this was the talented Leslie’s final feature. Agnes Moorehead and Michael Pate are excellent as the film’s villains Bertha and Adkins, although we have to read between the lines to figure out their vaguely sadistic relationship. The madam and the enforcer talk mean to the club girls, keeping discipline tight so not to be shut down by the city. The humorless Bertha apparently keeps the white-suited Adkins as a lover, but she also seems to have a hard-case attraction to her star employee Mamie. By the end of the show it’s almost as if Mamie is keeping Bertha. I suspect that the book is much more direct about all this.

Pay close attention to the voice of the steamer captain who takes Jim and Mamie to Honolulu … it’s Alan Reed, who later did the voice of Fred Flintstone. Reed’s a fun joker of a guy — after a few seconds, he also begins to look like Fred Flintstone…

The production is certainly attractive, especially in HD. Leo Tover’s cinematography captures the sunny, breezy look of Honolulu. There’s just enough gorgeous Hawaiian-shot footage to create a we-are-there illusion, with Egan and Russell splashing in the surf at Waikiki. Raoul Walsh’s economical direction doesn’t go in for a lot of camera angles, but is flexible enough not to look like an old man’s movie.

When December 7, 1941 rolls around we expect just to see a stock shot or two, but the movie stages a pretty good effects sequence. Cutaways to miniatures of ships being hit may have been borrowed from another movie, but if so I haven’t seen it. Fighter planes are nicely added to skies, especially in a scene where citizens are strafed in a pineapple field. How so many people got out to the fairly remote pineapple fields at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, I don’t know. The frightened citizens running in the Honolulu streets motivate Mamie’s brainstorm to buy up real estate in panic sales. Finally seeing Mamie Stover on TCM several years ago answered a question about some mysterious shots in a science fiction movie made the next year. I’ve prepared a separate show-off page about the unusual observation, A Clever, Resourceful Special Effect Surprise.

The great-looking The Revolt of Mamie Stover is one of Jane Russell’s more attractive pictures after her classic appearance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. If the Production Code didn’t have such a hammerlock on film content, this could have been a great picture too.

The Twilight Time Blu-ray of The Revolt of Mamie Stover is a terrific encoding of this Color by Deluxe beauty. The HD scan looks great, sharp and colorful — Jane Russell’s dresses by Travilla are much classsier than those seen in her recent Hot Blood and Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Twilight Time’s box copy calls out the film’s aspect ratio as 2.35:1, which should be right for 1956. But the Fox scan of the movie measures out nearer the slightly earlier, wider 2.55:1 Cinemascope ratio. The non-authoritative IMDB lists 2:55 as well. In some shots there appears to be a little dead space on the left, where the monaural optical soundtrack would go.

A music track is provided in 5.1 DTS-HD MA. Hugo Friedhofer’s brassy score uses a key theme that for its first few notes exactly copies the main theme of Pete Kelly’s Blues. It’s still attractive. Various Hawaiian songs and older Fox-licensed cues (Kalamazoo) are worked into the club music. The movie manages at least some feel for the year 1941 — including some very attractive cars.

Julie Kirgo’s liner notes extol the unappreciated film career of Raoul Walsh. The one video extra is a surviving remnant of a trailer, now completely faded. It reminds me of some of the faded Fox collection prints screened for us back at UCLA. If the film elements for the main feature faded at all, one can’t tell by Twilight Time’s disc, which looks sensational.

Vintage ’30s comedy returns, with a beautiful blonde, a sassy brunette and elaborate location filming in a bygone Los Angeles. Hal Roach found a good match for his ‘female Laurel & Hardy’ comedy team in gorgeous Thelma Todd and the smart-mouthed Patsy Kelly.

Hal Roach made the movie game pay big even back in the ‘teens, when Los Angeles used zoning laws to force moviemakers away from downtown, into the remote ‘suburbs’ of Hollywood and Culver City. Taking a choice piece of Culver City real estate, Hal built a veritable empire of comedy, mostly with short subjects. He helped launch the great Harold Lloyd, invented and maintained the popular ‘Our Gang’ series and was the producer who teamed up Laurel & Hardy, his biggest success. Roach released through MGM in the 1930s and then with United Artists; his only major business faux-pas was a brief business partnership with the son of Benito Mussolini, an Italian fascist, just as war was breaking out in Europe.

Roach never left a possibility unturned, and spent the 1930s developing a female version of Laurel & Hardy for the then- lucrative short subject market. The trick was pairing the right two actresses. The go-to glamour girl was Thelma Todd, a drop-dead gorgeous fashion plate comedienne who memorably served as eye candy in two Marx Brothers features. She also popped up in interesting roles in dramas: William Wyler’s Counselor-At-Law, Clara Bow’s Call Her Savage. Very popular in and around the Hollywood scene, Thelma was considered a class act. She managed her own showcase cafe out on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Roach first paired Thelma Todd with Zasu Pitts, the brilliant silent film actress who when sound came in turned more to comedy, playing nervous, high-strung types. Their seventeen two-reelers found popularity between 1931 and 1933, when they broke up over a salary dispute. Pitts’ legacy was permanently damaged in the 1960s when the Tonight Show host Johnny Carson used her name in skits, just because it sounded funny to say next to the names of other former silent stars, like ‘Gustav von Seyffertitz.’

A master of the mix & match school of casting, Hal Roach saw no need to end the series. He replaced Pitts with young Patsy Kelly, a brash, fast-talking Vaudeville comedienne. Definitely not a looker, Kelly nevertheless floored audiences with her game smiles, fast wisecracks and saucy put-downs. The 21 Todd-Kelly short subjects between 1933 and 1936 mostly use the same comic chemistry. The girls ‘play themselves’ with their own names. Thelma is poised and gracious, even when they’re looking for jobs or otherwise down on their luck. She’s not particularly bright and tends to be a little gullible. Patsy is a troublemaker who somehow turns every situation into a problem. Distrustful of everybody, she has a bad habit of picking fights, just for the fun of it. Equally a bit dim in the brains department, the excitable Patsy easily goes out of control.

The Complete Hal Roach Thelma Todd Patsy Kelly Comedy Collection stretches across three discs. Compared to typical short subjects by smaller outfits, the Todd-Kelly shows have lavish production values. Many scenes are filmed on local Los Angeles streets, giving location hunters a field day (I’ve had my eye peeled on short subjects for years, hoping someday a show would pop up filmed on my block of Gower Street!). As a two-reeler lasts between sixteen and twenty minutes, the shorts have time for two or three developed scenes, giving Patsy a chance to work up a comedy routine. Thelma tends to be the Straight Girl of the team. They aren’t committed bachelorettes, as each is occasionally linked with a possible romance, even if only a gag. Some shorts see them interested in millionaire- hunting, although Thelma is never a gold digger in the predatory sense.

Roach’s writers rely on the standard formulas to put the girls into new situations. Some of the same supporting character actors show up, probably Roach regulars and holdovers from the silent era. Roach had the reputation of loyalty to a large group of actors typed in lowbrow comedy. Occasional ‘name’ performers show up, like Billy Gilbert and Esther Howard — all but the most famous character actors likely pursued the goal of working as many days per year as possible. A funny short set in a radio station is noted as the first appearance of Roy Rogers, unbilled, as a lead singer of the Sons of the Pioneeers; from what I could tell, he’s on screen for approximately three seconds, as most of the act is heard from the next room. Patsy gets a chance to dance in the episode.

Roach uses a lot of special effects for certain shows, as with a good short about an airplane rigged with ejection parachute seats. The very first short stages several car fender-benders, as Patsy slowly demolishes a new roadster in a Laurel & Hardy-like game of tit for tat. We strain to recognize some locations, but the first short also features many views of UCLA and Westwood in 1933. Both Westside attractions are surrounded by plenty of vacant lots.

Yet another short would seem an inspiration for Jacques Tati — Thelma and Patsy are roped into demonstrating a newfangled washing machine in an elaborate department store window display. A crowd gathers while, naturally, the two ever-so-gracefully destroy everything.

Here’s ClassicFlix’s official rundown on the twenty one shorts.

DISC 1

Beauty and the Bus (1933, 17:21) – The girls win a new car and take it out for a spin. With Don Barclay, Eddie Baker, Tiny Sandford, Charlie Hall and Tommy Bond.

Backs to Nature (1933, 19:22) – Hoping for a good rest, the girls go camping in the woods. With Don Barclay, Alice Belcher and Charlie Hall.

Air Fright (1933, 18:36) – Thelma and Patsy are “air hostesses” during a flight to test an experimental parachute. With Don Barclay, Billy Bletcher and Wilfred Lucas.

Babes in the Goods (1934, 19:00) – The girls get locked in a department store window overnight. With Arthur Housman and Jack Barty.

Soup and Fish (1934, 17:50) – The girls are mistakenly invited to a swank affair and become the life of the party. With Billy Gilbert, Gladys Gale, Don Barclay and Charlie Hall.

One-Horse Farmers (1934, 17:21) – Patsy and Thelma leave the big city for the simplicity of farm life. With James C. Morton, Nora Cecil and Billy Bletcher.

Opened by Mistake (1934, 18:46) – Patsy loses her job and apartment and barges in on Thelma at the local hospital where she lives and works as a nurse. With Nora Cecil, Charlie Hall and William Burress.

Done in Oil (1934, 17:54) – Thelma poses as a famous artist to try and sell some of her paintings. With Arthur Housman, Eddie Conrad, Leo White, Art Rowlands and William Wagner.

Bum Voyage (1934, 19:55) – The girls get free tickets on a cruise, but soon find out their presumed identities are as gorilla tamer and assistant. With Adrian Rosley and Noah Young.

Sing Sister Sing (1935, 20:10) – Patsy is invited to room with Thelma, but they don’t get along. With Arthur Housman, Harry Bowen and Charlie Hall.

The Tin Man (1935, 14:47) – Lost while driving, the girls stop and ask for directions at the house of a mad scientist who is bent on the destruction of the opposite sex. With Clarence Wilson and Matthew Betz.

The Misses Stooge (1935, 18:48) – After losing their jobs as hoofers, the girls are recruited by a magician to be in his act. With Esther Howard, Herman Bing, Rafael Storm and Henry Roquemore.

DISC 3

Slightly Static (1935, 18:20) – Looking for a job in radio, the girls land a break when other performers walk out just before air time. With Sons of the Pioneers (including Roy Rogers in his first screen appearance), The Randall Sisters, Harold Waldridge, Dell Henderson, Nora Cecil and Carol Hughes.

Twin Triplets (1935, 20:29) – Patsy gives news reporter Thelma a hot tip about sextuplets being born and they concoct a plan to use the story as a means to land on easy street. With Greta Meyer, John Dilson, Billy Bletcher, Bess Flowers, Charlie Hall, Grace Goodall, James C. Morton and Charley Rogers.

Hot Money (1935, 17:23) – A crook asks the girls to hold $50,000 in cash, but when he winds up dead, everyone in the girls’ apartment building is a suspect. With James Burke, Fred Kelsey, Louis Natheaux and Brooks Benedict.

An All-American Toothache (1936, 19:38) – Thelma convinces Patsy she has a toothache in order to let the local college football star pass his dental exam. With Johnny Arthur, Mickey Daniels, Duke York, Bud Jamison, Si Jenks and Billy Bletcher.

Hill-Tillies (1936, 17:52) – Out-of-work showgirls Patsy and Lyda hatch a scheme to get free publicity by camping out in the forest without any modern conveniences. With Toby Wing, Harry Bowen, Sam Adams, Jim Thorpe and James C. Morton.

The bonus shorts attempt to continue the series after Thelma Todd’s unexpected death in December of 1936. It took place in the garage of the ex-wife of Todd’s former lover Roland West, just a block or so from her beach cafe in Pacific Palisades. Most references now list the death as a possible suicide but more likely an accident of carbon monoxide poisoning. Stories once circulated that Todd was involved with gangsters and that her death was a murder. Those theories eventually dried up, as did some of the more salacious ‘Hollywood Babylon’ scandals, as better research cleared away the gossip cobwebs.

A small group of friends certainly knew about the mystery death. Between other jobs, we worked off and on at Paulist Productions, a religious film company that in the ’70s occupied Todd’s former Pacific Palisades cafe — which we were told had been a nightclub.

Actually, the rumors we heard were so exaggerated that the cafe became a speakeasy (what, after the repeal of prohibition?) frequented by dangerous characters. The building’s castle-like interior had such character that it was easy to believe such tales. Until the internet days made it easier to find decent information (if one were careful), we thought that Todd had died on the premises. The buzz was that the building was haunted.

The collection includes three of the four post-Todd Patsy Kelly short subjects. The fun Pert Kelton made just one short. She doesn’t seem a particularly good fit for Patsy. Kelton became more famous as Jackie Gleason’s first Alice Kramden on TV’s The Honeymooners; she’d lose that gig to the blacklist.

The other nominated Thelma Todd replacement is the unusual Lyda Roberti, a child of the Russian Revolution who came to show business via Shanghai. Roberti’s exotic accent is heard coming down a ship’s gangplank as she’s introduced singing in At Sea Ashore; her mispronunciation of English words is initially funny, but doesn’t seem like the kind of gag that could sustain a character for very long.

Patsy Kelly’s film career went into a decline; we’re told that for a time she worked as Tallulah Bankhead’s personal assistant. She got a new lease on comedy with the arrival of TV. Although she appeared in numerous TV shows and had guest spots in Disney pictures, film fans best know her indelible character turn as the loathsome, slovenly Laura Louise, the witch that babysits poor Rosemary Woods in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.

ClassicFlix’s 3-disc DVD set The Complete Hal Roach Thelma Todd Patsy Kelly Comedy Collection does a major service for 30s comedy cinema, giving us an entire run of Roach comedies to study. These are the kinds of shows that appear at Cinecon, but otherwise might be forgotten.

The quality is fine. The shows are licensed from a company called Sonar Entertainment, so I’d imagine the rights went in a different direction from other former Hal Roach productions, such as the features now distributed on disc by VCI. Someone (MGM?) clearly stored the elements well enough; none of the Todd-Kelly titles are missing. Of the thirteen I saw, I ran into none in which the image or sound was degraded.

CineSavant shows off an arcane observation: in 1957, scenes from a glossy CinemaScope Fox production directed by Raoul Walsh, were almost immediately re-purposed, with grandiose special effects added, for a landmark science fiction fantasy. It’s an opportunity to admire the resourceful artistry of Jack Rabin, Louis DeWitt and Irving Block, special effects professionals that did fine work but were seldom if ever considered for industry awards.

Back in the 1970s I picked up from Larry Edmunds’ Bookstore a copy of a one-shot special effects fan magazine that I think had been put together by the effects master/researcher Robert Skotak. (I then loaned it to an optical printer operator on CE3K, and never saw it again.) The photo magazine lauded the efforts of a Hollywood effects partnership consisting of Jack Rabin, Irving Block and Louis DeWitt. Their names appeared on dozens of 1950s films, for their creative optical work — whatever enhancements might be needed, from simple title sequences to matte shots and even stop-motion animation when required.

Irving Block and Jack Rabin also racked up some writing and producing credits, for producers like Robert Lippert, Roger Corman, Al Zimbalist, Alex Gordon — and MGM’s Dore Schary. Block took a story credit on Forbidden Planet, as well as Kronos, and Block and Rabin collaborated on the stories for War of the Satellites and The Atomic Submarine.

After the success of Forbidden Planet all three became credited producers on 1957’s Kronos, an elaborate science fiction thriller about a robotic ‘energy accumulator’ sent across space by an alien civilization. The giant machine marches across the countryside from Mexico to Los Angeles, sapping power stations and even absorbing the energy from a thermonuclear bomb.

A spectacular mile-high robot that shoots out weird rays isn’t the kind of effect normally attempted even on a big budget, let alone the small potatoes afforded Lippert’s Kronos. The effects team used every clever trick they had, starting with conventional matte paintings. In the one seen just below, showing the destructive path of Kronos, the entire shot is a painting. I remember that Robert Skotak’s article also explained that one aerial shot of the desert was accomplished through an Avant-Garde rough & ready technique: they simply threw down a sheet over an irregular surface, and airbrushed mountains onto it. Reflections from the ocean surf were superimposed over shots to represent the Kronos robot’s ‘energy waves.’ Multiple exposures and heated paint created clever destruction effects for the melt-down of Kronos, an effect similar to that used for the melting Krell door in Forbidden Planet.

Robert L. Lippert produced Kronos, yet he is not credited on it by name. As confirmed by researcher-interviewer Tom Weaver, just a couple of years previous to Kronos, the film Guilds blackballed Lippert for dodging payment of residuals when he released his film library to television. Lippert soon went Guild-underground. He turned right around and for four or five years stealth-produced movies under the Regal Films banner. Producing credit was officially assigned to an associate or to the director, as with the director of Kronos, Kurt Neumann. All of this was done in close association with 20th Fox, which somehow got away with bankrolling a long list of Lippert pictures. Regal productions were made on the Fox lot with Fox resources, even the music library. Kronos reportedly filmed on Fox sound stages. The Fox-licensed song ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ is heard as source music on a radio. The Guilds had to know what was going on… or did they?

Fox was so keen on Lippert & Neumann’s proposed production of The Fly that they bumped it up to official studio release status, adding color and stereophonic sound. Lippert still couldn’t take a credit. His name didn’t return to the screen until he moved his operation to England, as Associated Producers.

The extensive model and matte work by Rabin, DeWitt and Block also involved future Project Unlimited principals Gene Warren and Wah Chang, who reportedly created the (beautifully designed) Kronos stop motion puppet.

The makers of Kronos scoured stock footage libraries for shots to enhance the scenes of destruction. Fox had its own stock library. Very recognizable are cuts of buildings collapsing from 1955’s The Rains of Ranchipur which had been nominated for an effects award. But one Fox film library raid rates as one of the most clever uses of stock footage in studio history. As part of its cross-country trek the gigantic ‘tinkertoy’ robot marches across the Mexican landscape and smashes through a city. Crowds of Mexicans are seen fleeing in terror. The shots always looked strange to me — even in B&W we can see that the Mexicans wear Hawaiian shirts. At least one woman is wearing a muumuu dress. The residential streets look just like the hillsides of Honolulu, that I remember from 1959-1960.

The mystery source for the Hawaiian/Mexican footage is one of those non-issues that frequently seize film fans. I thought about it off and on since at least the 1980s. Then a couple of years ago I happened to catch a TCM showing of the 1956 Jane Russell/Raoul Walsh drama The Revolt of Mamie Stover, which takes place in Hawaii in 1941. At right about the 45-minute mark the effects supervisor Ray Kellogg stages a pretty good Pearl Harbor attack sequence, with miniature ships burning and Japanese planes buzzing overhead. Panicked locals run for their lives in town. Out in the island’s photogenic pineapple fields they are strafed by enemy fighter planes.

The effects men must have immediately seen that Mamie Stover — which happens to be a Fox film — could provide shots for the town attack and panic sequences in Kronos. A bunch of material from the stock library was indeed used, including angles not used in Mamie. Below are three examples of perfect matches, comparing the original CinemaScope & color Mamie Stover scene, with a corresponding B&W shot in the ‘Regalscope’ Kronos.

Note that the scans for the DVD of Kronos are a lot tighter, cropping quite a bit from the left extreme of the frame. This is likely because the anamorphic formats are not exactly the same. Mamie Stover on disc is wider than we would expect for 1956. It is still displaying the early CinemaScope 2.55:1 aspect ratio, whereas Regalscope is calibrated at the compromise 2:35:1 AR, that leaves room for a non-magnetic optical soundtrack. In the color shots, the ‘extra’ real estate at the left extreme of the frame might be where an optical soundtrack would go. I expect that my experts might be writing me about this one.

In this third example of a ‘borrowed’ stock shot we can see that the B&W Kronos uses the original camera shot unchanged, whereas Mamie’s Ray Kellogg created an optical matte to put the beach farther away, and to add airplanes, smoke and explosions in the distance, over Pearl Harbor. The entire top half of the shot has been replaced. Note that the color Mamie shot erases a lot of wires from the sky. The matte chops off trees and telephone poles, leaving the lower parts of poles and tree trunks intact.

One of the best effects illusions in Kronos is just below — a dramatic wide shot in which the alien robot ‘accumulator’ broadcasts energy waves over a vast agricultural valley. The very recognizable location is a huge pineapple field in the Northern central plain of the island of Oahu. If I have the orientation correct, we’re looking Southwest. Pearl Harbor is offscreen to the left, perhaps ten or fifteen miles away.

I’ve previously identified the depression in the mountains as Kolekole Pass, through which the main force of Japanese war planes was said to have flown during the famous attack, ‘sneaking up’ on Pearl Harbor from the inland side, when Navy lookouts might be scanning the skies over the ocean. At least, that’s what we were told many times as kids, fewer than twenty years after the historical event took place. We once drove through Kolekole Pass, and my memory of that trip is that it was narrower. It’s right above the Schofield Barracks, the Army base depicted in From Here to Eternity. In the color shot Schofield is just to the left of screen center, where some white smoke is rising.

Kronos’ B&W alteration blows up the original shot rather drastically, so for comparison purposes I’ve cropped the original color version to match — note the matching profile of the mountains. Just below, I’ve repeated the color shot of the wide valley un-cropped and full width as it appears in Mamie. Note that it has a lot of empty sky above, perhaps indicating that Ray Kellogg may have left open the option of adding airplanes or other attack effects, for the Hawaiians in the foreground to be running away from.

In any case please note that my rough images are not precise representations of either disc source — they aren’t accurate frame grabs.

Kronos is quite a workout for the imagination, as well as the resourcefulness of its clever visual effects artists. Some shots are more convincing than others, although even the views of the marching robot achieved through flat cel animation are state-of-the-art for 1957. The ‘pineapple field’ shot just above is definitely one of the best — the robot indeed looks like a skyscraper-sized mystery monster.

Were Kronos’ spectacular optical effects nominated for an Academy Award in 1957? No way. They go far beyond the standard submarine-movie images seen in that year’s Special Effects Academy Award winner, The Enemy Below. According to one of my professors back at UCLA, whose father had been a Hollywood agent, in the old days Oscars for technical categories were often divvied up between the big studios, and negotiated by agents. At least, that was his opinion. But given the history of the Academy, the work of small studios and independent artists and technicians was only occasionally considered Oscar-worthy, usually when an independent film became so successful that it could not be ignored.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/a-clever-resourceful-special-effect-surprise/feed/4https://trailersfromhell.com/a-clever-resourceful-special-effect-surprise/Seven Days In Mayhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/QifMTK0iNUc/
https://trailersfromhell.com/seven-days-may/#commentsFri, 27 Jul 2018 04:00:34 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=16536As Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas tighten the screws in a life and death face-off between a traitorous general and his whistle-blowing aide, John Frankenheimer keeps upping the ante in this brilliantly directed political thriller scripted by Rod Serling in 1964. Good-guy politicos Fredric March and Edmond O’Brien push back against the gathering storm while...

]]>As Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas tighten the screws in a life and death face-off between a traitorous general and his whistle-blowing aide, John Frankenheimer keeps upping the ante in this brilliantly directed political thriller scripted by Rod Serling in 1964. Good-guy politicos Fredric March and Edmond O’Brien push back against the gathering storm while conspirators Whit Bissell and Hugh Marlowe keep adding fuel to the fire.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/seven-days-may/feed/2https://trailersfromhell.com/seven-days-may/The Trainhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/CsE99IUIuS4/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-train/#respondWed, 25 Jul 2018 04:00:29 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=28598John Frankenheimer’s 1965 World War II film is a admirable attempt to fuse the action genre with art-house drama ala The Wages of Fear. Thanks to Frankenheimer’s clean craftsmanship and star Burt Lancaster’s ambivalent performance – part rough and tumble leading man, part existential anti-hero – the movie succeeds on most counts. Burt is a...

]]>John Frankenheimer’s 1965 World War II film is a admirable attempt to fuse the action genre with art-house drama ala The Wages of Fear. Thanks to Frankenheimer’s clean craftsmanship and star Burt Lancaster’s ambivalent performance – part rough and tumble leading man, part existential anti-hero – the movie succeeds on most counts. Burt is a resistance leader trying to retrieve a shipment of precious art from a da Vinci-loving Nazi played by Paul Scofield while New Wave icon Jeanne Moreau is on hand to abet Lancaster’s quest.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-train/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/the-train/The Stranglers of Bombayhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/mObKJHEIfVQ/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-stranglers-of-bombay/#commentsTue, 24 Jul 2018 20:15:38 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34461 “Kali bids us to Kill! KILL!” A full review of Indicator’s Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror collection will follow, but CineSavant jumps the gun to highlight Terence Fisher’s 1959 mass murder shocker. It adds up to more than exploitative and racist cheap thrills: it’s one of the key films to describe the roots...

“Kali bids us to Kill! KILL!” A full review of Indicator’s Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror collection will follow, but CineSavant jumps the gun to highlight Terence Fisher’s 1959 mass murder shocker. It adds up to more than exploitative and racist cheap thrills: it’s one of the key films to describe the roots of contemporary terrorism. David Zelag Goodman’s screenplay lets Hammer for once say something relevant about the Colonial past, even if it’s a case of mixed signals — and sex.

The Stranglers of Bombay is one of the ‘contentious’ Hammer films that remained more or less unavailable until the DVD era, like the unsavory-sounding (but thoroughly laudable) Never Take Sweets from a Stranger. I had no access to any of the exotic Columbia Hammers until a friend was in charge of remastering some of them; we were blown away in 1996 to see the uncut These are the Damned. Before then Terence Fisher’s Stranglers had existed only as an entry in the Hardy Encyclopedia, introduced with a description that made it sound like a must-see:

‘Fisher’s first Hammer horror film without Jimmy Sangster as writer meshes sex and terror to an unprecedented degree in a colonial fantasy chronicling both the callousness of British rule in India and the amazed culture-shock when a mirror image of their own murderous greed is presented to them with equally high-sounding moral-religious justification’.

We were curious to learn what the legendary cut material might be. The U.S. version we could see bore no telltale edits or sound jumps, only a rude cut to black in the title sequence that made us suspect that something might be missing.

Stranglers is yet another Hammer effort to spin a genre in the direction of bloody horror, as they had just done with a war film. Despite being based on recorded truth, the POW atrocities of The Camp on Blood Island have an overpowering feeling of exploitative bad taste. What now seems culturally offensive to us in many English pictures of the 1950s is the characterization of foreigners as inscrutable, barbaric and ‘un-English.’ The Japanese in Camp are barbaric degenerates, while the Indians of Stranglers are either passively hostile or fiendishly monstrous religious fanatics. Of course, the average PC examination of either movie will not look beyond the sight of Indian and Japanese portrayed by English actors in exaggerated yellow-face makeup. That convention hasn’t completely gone away.

India had won its independence from colonial rule in 1948, but Stranglers is one of the first British films to criticize that rule (and only partly). Since the 1850s, the British East India Company was in charge of the country’s trade and administration… essentially ‘privatizing’ the lives of millions of Indians. The ‘Thuggee Affair’ in the historical record is the discovery by Major General Sleeman that a secret cult of thieving stranglers existed. It is traditionally used in drama to demonstrate that England’s presence was beneficial.

The excellent screenplay by American writer David Zelag Goodman attacks the concept of Thuggee from multiple directions. It is first the Rudyard Kipling- like adventure of an English Captain who uncovers the murder cult for King and Country. It’s secondly an examination of the fanatic cult itself, which warps the Indian deity Kali to serve as a ‘Death Mother’ demanding murder for its own sake. The leaders of the cult are maniacal hypocrites, in that they direct their cult members to attack caravans for profit. Thirdly, Goodman stresses a political twist that can’t be ignored: the cult leaders’ other purpose is to subvert British rule and keep rebellion alive. The Stranglers of Bombay is more than an adventure about the suppression of a gang of fanatics — parts of the screenplay portray the Thugs very much as terrorists, in the modern sense.

Hammer’s elaborate production and Terence Fisher’s measured direction give Stranglers a sense of real-world credibility. Merchants in a regional town (not Bombay/Mumbai) complain that their trade caravans are ‘disappearing.’ They air their grievances to the East India Company’s Colonel Henderson (Andrew Cruikshank) through Patel Shari (Marne Maitland), a rich local who ran trade before the British took over. Captain Harry Lewis (Guy Rolfe of Mr. Sardonicus) is keen to track down the killers, and has the necessary knowledge of the local customs. But Henderson instead appoints the son of a friend, Captain Connaught-Smith (Allan Cuthbertson) to the post. The condescending Connaught-Smith ignores Lewis’s advice, and discounts the evidence of mass graves indicating that ‘something’ is systematically wiping out entire caravans. Captain Lewis must investigate on his own, and pushes forward even after the disappearance of his servant Ram Das (Tutte Lemkow). Lewis’s wife is horrified when Ram Das’s severed hand is thrown on her dining room table.

What Lewis only slowly uncovers is a diabolical cult of fanatics that waylays travelers and caravans, murders everyone en masse, and buries all of the evidence. A High Priest (George Pastell) indoctrinates his cultists in the use of the silk garrotte, all the time emphasizing that to kill without drawing blood is to serve the demanding Kali. Cult members that betray their sacred oath suffer horrible mutilations, and are used as practice kills by young initiates. The Thug conspiracy is seemingly everywhere. Not even Captain Lewis suspects that it has infiltrated the ranks of the Company.

Stranglers has strong adventure elements. Lewis goes on a tiger hunt. He carries his pet mongoose on trips, and it saves his life when the High Priest stakes him in the sun before altar of Kali, as a victim for a king cobra. But everything contributes to the depiction of the Thug conspiracy. To keep the cult secret and instill fear in the ranks, terrible punishments are dealt out to rule-breakers. Leaks don’t occur because potential leakers are systematically eliminated. A Thug captured by the Company is so brainwashed into thinking his holy duty is to die, that once on the gallows he joyfully hangs himself, pushing his executioners aside.

The film is an unbroken series of shocking highlights. The story’s only weakness is at the end, when it suddenly abandons an almost perfect progression of scenes to wrap things up with an unconvincing action scene, after which the main villain inexplicably reveals his perfidy to all.

The morbid action highlight puts the audience in the bizarre position of partly siding with a band of mass murderers. After ignoring Lewis’s advice and entreaties, Captain Connaught-Smith personally leads a giant caravan. He finds himself in a genuinely horrifying situation — surrounded by a sea of death and the inescapable truth that he’s been wrong all along. Nobody merits such an awful fate, but we can’t help but think that Connaught-Smith is getting exactly what he deserves.

The Stranglers of Bombay shows shocking things that simply weren’t directly depicted in earlier movies about fanatic Indian cults, like the classic escapist adventure Gunga Din. Flesh is cut and arms are branded with hot irons, in big close-up. We see pathetic prisoners with their limbs hacked off and their eyes put out. Dialogue informs us that their tongues are removed as well — we don’t see this, but Hammer portrayed the same mutilation in its Technicolor The Mummy. The sadistic element is emphasized at all times.

Was Stranglers the title that brought the wrath of conservative critics and the censors down on Hammer Films? The movie wasn’t even rated ‘X,’ probably for three reasons: it was an historical thriller, not a ‘degenerate’ horror movie; its scenes of blood and mutilation are in B&W, not color; and, the mutilated victims on camera are almost all non- Anglos. That last reason speaks to the core of racism: doing terrible things to Indians is less offensive than doing the same things to Anglos.

The cultists are an unforgettable gallery of fiends, too individualized to simply be racial bogeymen. Hammer’s all-purpose ‘horror-wog’ George Pastell (From Russia with Love) nails his role as the dynamic high priest, carrying almost the entire burden of making the Kali cult into a viable conspiracy. His lesson to the initiates on how to beg and grovel to deceive can be taken as what non-Anglo subjects must do to survive in a colonial state. The Priest’s assistant Bundar (Roger Delgado) helps enforce the horrible punishments. Paul Stassino (Thunderball) is a devious undercover policeman on Colonel Henderson’s own staff.

Allan Cuthbertson didn’t always play insufferable prigs, but that seems to be his most common role: Shake Hands with the Devil, The Guns of Navarone. His Captain Connaught-Smith is a familiar figure in any large company — an entitled exceptionalist disinterested in anything but moving up the ladder. Knowing and caring nothing about India, he’ll conduct some interviews and write a report saying there’s nothing to be learned. Connaught-Smith regards Captain Lewis as a nobody, someone to be ignored. He’s not stupid, but his boundless arrogance is is downfall.

Marne Maitland’s complex leader Patel Shari directs the cult while posing as cooperative to the English. He’s a depraved sadist with a wicked sense of humor, who is made sick to his stomach by the very atrocities he commands to be performed on the cult’s victims. He’s of course a racist invention, the polite but two-faced foreigner that pretends friendship while indulging in gruesome revenge fantasies, the kind that occurred in the’ Black Hole of Calcutta‘.

Even though his victims are almost all Indians, not Englishmen, Patel is a key film character predicting the nature of modern political terrorism. In one brief exchange Patel voices key dialogue indicating an advanced, post-colonial ‘justification’ for acts of terror. Losing his patience over Connaught-Smith’s insistence that the secret shallow graves are just ordinary graveyards, Captain Lewis shares his frustration with Patel, who answers matter-of-factly:

If the Company maintains that it is a cemetery, “then it is a cemetery. Whoever rules decides the truth.”

Patel’s few words capture exactly the nature of political power — England claims a benign rule but is really using force to impose its version of reality on its subjects. ‘Seizing control of the narrative’ is a politician’s first goal. Political oppression requires the spreading of self-serving lies. A despot can lie with impunity.

Stranglers’ most exploitative angle is likely its number one draw for today’s Hammer fans. Model-actress Marie Devereaux is the un-billed Karim, a female cult member who decorates various scenes in the High Priest’s lair. Hammer would later become famous for its reliance on bosomy actresses to be victimized by vampires, etc., but Devereaux’s revealing costume is the most extreme before the rating system came in ten years later. Even critic Raymond Durgnat noted her ‘ostentatious bosom’ in the scene where Karim taunts the thirsty Lewis, tied spreadeagled in the sun.

The teasing of Lewis with more than just the water he can’t have is exactly the kind of mix of sex and sadism that got horror films banned from England 25 years before. The Hardy Encyclopedia never misses a chance to make a political statement with horror, and in this case interprets Devereaux’s Karim as a literal sexual terrorist:

‘… she manages to convey the passionate excitement that can accompany the twisted but liberating explosion of revenge after decades of poverty and repression.’

Interesting critical studies examine some classic Hammer films that involve weak or crippled male characters dominated by strong, proactive female characters: Marla Landi in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Yvonne Furneaux in The Mummy, Barbara Shelley in The Gorgon. As a distillation of pure sexual sadism, Karim is a proud member of this sorority. She smiles at the High Priest’s calls to violence, and almost giggles to see the blind, mutilated Thug victims crawling out to eat slops from a bowl. Karim is sexually aroused when witnessing arm-slashings and hot-iron brandings. She feeds on Captain Smith’s suffering. The commentators on the Indicator disc peg Karim’s function correctly: she represents the film’s notion of an evil Kali, a god frequently pictured with a similar ‘ostentatious bosom.’ How dare critics accuse Stranglers of lurid sensationalism — it’s culturally accurate!

The only female figure opposing Karim is Lewis’s wife Mary, a delicate lady of the era, whose prime concern is helping her husband manage her career. Mary may be the last of the shrinking violet Hammer heroines in the mold of Melissa Stribling in Horror of Dracula. She is the one confronted by a threatening severed hand, a frequent image in the nightmares of colonial occupiers. What Stranglers could really have used is a Mary-Karim confrontation, like that between Edna May Oliver and Blanche Yurka in the classic A Tale of Two Cities. Captain Lewis shouldn’t be the only one to exhibit British pluck and spirit.

Despite its charges of Company ignorance and incompetence, The Stranglers of Bombay never posits a full anti-colonial position statement. As with traditional tales, it’s assumed that India needs the paternal stability of England to hold back the forces of anarchy and darkness. Although Guy Rolfe’s Captain Lewis complains that England may lose India, he’s still a product of his age. In one scene Lewis is dismissive of the Muslim call to prayer:

“I suppose you get to believing it if you keep on repeating it.”

But we like his self-satisfied reaction to see his theory vindicated, purring, “They’ve all been murr-dered.” We have to admit that we’re a bit disappointed that Captain Lewis’s main reward, after uncovering the Crime of the Century and single-handedly assuring the success of Britain in India, is just to keep his lousy job. I’d say that’s fine, as long as Karim becomes his new receptionist. Or was Karim one of the thousand-plus Thugs hanged in the subsequent criminal investigation?

Powerhouse Indicator’s Blu-ray of The Stranglers of Bombay is given its own keep case in the four-disc set Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror. The rich B&W scan is much sharper than the old Sony DVD. Hammer’s B&W productions from this period were often more elaborate than their Technicolor work, and the marketplace set constructed at the relatively tiny Bray Studio looks impressively large. Likewise the soundstage night exteriors are designed well. The only been-there-done-that are the exteriors filmed in the same depressing Bray excavation (a gravel pit?) revisited far too often. A wilted palm tree or two do not make it seem more like India. Cinematographer Arthur Grant does make everything seem too bright and too hot, a trick that might be difficult in color. Hammer correspondence claims that historical realism dictated the use of B&W, but I can’t see anybody imagining that the gore-mutilation scenes would ever be approved if shown in color.

The extras for Stranglers will be a big attraction for curious Hammer fans. Jonathan Rigby and Alan Barnes host an informative featurette examining the film as a whole. Colette Balmain discusses actress Jan Holden for a six-minute ‘women of Hammer’ piece. David Z. Goodman’s commentary has been retained from the old DVD; he’s engaging enough but has little to say about his early screenplay. Getting some positive web buzz is a long featurette on James Bernard’s dynamic music track scored with nervous drums and brass. Spokesman David Huckvale approaches the score in terms of the Avant-Garde. I hope he waxes as critical on the James Bernard music for the anticipated Indicator disc of These are the Damned.

Even though the BBFC files on the film have gone missing, ex- censor Richard Falcon spends 27 minutes covering its censorship issues. Violence was trimmed for the U.K., while short cuts of Marie Devereaux were dropped for America (but with one left in the trailer!). We’re told that a couple of tiny trims have yet to be located.

The best news of all is that Indicator gives us three encodings of the film. The slightly longer UK cut changes the placement of a text scroll over a map of India. That accounts for the hard cut in older releases of the U.S. version. The ‘integral’ version keeps everything, which should please fans to no end: Marie Devereaux’s brief but telling ‘aroused’ cutaway shots are intact.

Unfortunately, the ‘Strangloscope’ format is called out only on the American trailer and posters. A Megascope logo has to suffice for the film’s original credits.

CineSavant will be following up with a review of the full Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror disc set.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Stranglers of BombayBlu-rayrates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Three presentations: the original UK and US theatrical versions; and a newly- created ‘integral’ version compiling all existing footage; Audio commentary by screenwriter David Z Goodman; A new documentary by Marcus Hearn, narrated by Claire Louise Amias and featuring film historians Alan Barnes and Jonathan Rigby; The Stranglers of Bombay and the Censor (2018): ex-BBFC examiner Richard Falcon on the film’s history with the Board; Musical Orientalism (2018): an appreciation of the James Bernard score by David Huckvale; Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Trailers from Hell trailer commentary, Original theatrical trailer, Image gallery of promotional photography and publicity material; 40-page insert booklet.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: July 23, 2018(5783stran)

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-stranglers-of-bombay/feed/6https://trailersfromhell.com/the-stranglers-of-bombay/Cinderella Libertyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/VhZyFoDp4AE/
https://trailersfromhell.com/cinderella-liberty/#commentsTue, 24 Jul 2018 20:11:13 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34459 A real peach of a ’70s New Hollywood picture, Mark Rydell and Darryl Ponicsan’s story of a sailor on extended leave is sentimental neorealism — a tough street story, but with the pessimism removed. Poolroom hustler Marsha Mason and sailor-adrift James Caan are a beautiful couple in the making — although the whole world...

A real peach of a ’70s New Hollywood picture, Mark Rydell and Darryl Ponicsan’s story of a sailor on extended leave is sentimental neorealism — a tough street story, but with the pessimism removed. Poolroom hustler Marsha Mason and sailor-adrift James Caan are a beautiful couple in the making — although the whole world seems against them.

Mark Rydell’s satisfying tough-love romance is yet more evidence why the early 1970s is still considered one of the most creative times in Hollywood. The actor- turned director channels the look of Robert Altman to tell what is essentially a hopeful, sentimental story. Basically the tale of a link-up between a sailor and a pool hall tramp, Cinderella Liberty overcomes traditional problems with such material. The ‘R’ rating for once allows such characters to talk as they might, although our nice-guy hero has a firm rule against profanity. Darryl Ponicsan’s story acknowledges the desperation of sailors to find female companionship, especially when on ‘Cinderella Liberty,’ as is called a shore pass that expires at midnight. Also breaking with Hollywood tradition, the film allows Marsha Mason’s hooker to be credibly profane and self destructive, and yet still be worthy of our concern. The movie has its share of emotional compromises but by the last act we’re only hoping that things turn out well for our deserving main characters.

The stage is quickly set for an intimate realist drama. Set ashore for minor surgery, Navy Boatswain John Baggs Jr. (James Caan) is stuck in the port of Seattle. After missing his boat, he is told that his records have been lost. Deprived of pay and left in reassignment limbo, he gravitates toward Maggie Paul (Marsha Mason), an alcoholic pool hustler and occasional prostitute. Maggie’s eleven year-old son Doug (Kirk Calloway) is well on his way to becoming a juvenile menace. Baggs knows the Navy will discourage him from making a serious commitment to this pathetic family, and when Baggs tries to get Maggie to seriously consider a relationship, she threatens to go back to the bottle and take other lovers. But Baggs won’t give up that easily.

It’s difficult to argue with perfect casting; James Caan and Marsha Mason have terrific chemistry. John Baggs and Maggie Paul’s romance must endure an uphill struggle, as neither the Navy nor common sense holds out much hope for their future together. Maggie and her son Doug would simply be homeless if it were not for her skill at separating sailors from their money. John Baggs beats her at her own tricks in a pool game, winning her favors. A more sentimental film would let Baggs prove his nobility by declining to collect on his bet but Cinderella Liberty wisely acknowledges that sex is the easy part. When it’s over, Baggs realizes that he wants a different kind of relationship. Maggie has plenty of reasons to be suspicious yet Baggs repeatedly proves himself sincere and honest. John manages to find a way into Doug’s good graces, despite meeting the boy over a hostile switchblade.

Cinderella Liberty looks at Baggs and Maggie’s entire social situation. Without official records John Baggs Jr. is in a bureaucratic vacuum. He has no choice but to stand endless watches as a shore patrolman (with the talkative, amusing Bruno Kirby) and do without pay for weeks. The Navy finally makes an effort to find the missing papers because an irate officer (Dabney Coleman) wants to get Baggs on a ship and out of port, away from ideas of getting married.

Things are even worse for Maggie. A social worker (wonderful Allyn McLerie) yanks Maggie’s welfare and food stamps, claiming that Baggs is ‘assuming the role of provider.’ After Baggs tells her the full story the social worker reverses her position and tries to help, but the damage has already been done. Even under normal conditions Maggie has difficulty finding ways to feel good about herself. She can’t take having her hopes raised, only to see them dashed yet one more time.

A sidebar plot deals with Baggs’ growing disillusion with the Navy. He runs into Lynn Forshay (Eli Wallach), a career sailor drummed out for mistreating an important man’s son. Forshay has taken a job as a strip club tout and would do anything to get back with the fleet. The conclusion ties up this part of the story rather neatly, while leaving us unsure whether Baggs will be able to keep his newly formed family intact. Tangent: I call this character fix the Brigadoon Solution, a musical where it should have been used.

Star James Caan was fresh from his celebrated role in The Godfather. Mark Rydell had to make a fuss to get Fox to accept young Marsha Mason as Maggie. It’s probable that her debut feature Blume in Love hadn’t even opened when she got this part. Ms. Mason is just sensational, projecting the bravado of a proud woman near the edge of collapse. Mason starts with a difficult acting feat, acting the good sport while losing a humiliating bet. How many actresses could portray losing such a bet, and laugh it off this good-naturedly? Ms. Mason is vivacious, genuinely funny and surely the most arresting star discovery of the year. Instead of using acting tricks to reveal Maggie’s vulnerable side, Mason simply has the woman endure her problems until she can’t take any more. Then she falls apart, all at once. Caan’s Baggs can’t pick up the pieces every time.

Several heart-wrenching events in the last act turn the light romance into a straight drama. It’s still more hopeful than Darryl Ponicsan’s less forgiving drama of the underside of Navy life, The Last Detail. Cinderella Liberty allows us to leave feeling good about its characters, even though their future is uncertain.

The production has a realistic feel for the Navy life. This isn’t exactly a recruiting film, as the young sailors are mostly assigned to hard menial labor. John Biggs has been in for a long time, but must serve boring watches. The U.S. Navy refused to cooperate with the producers because a major plot point depicts desertion of duty without consequences. To stand in for an American craft, Fox rented a small ship from the Canadian Navy. The rest of the show seems 100% authentic.

The other cliché deftly overturned is the ‘sailor befriends kid’ development. In one scene John takes Kirk Calloway’s Doug to a western movie; we worry that someone will accuse John of being a child molester. Doug eventually gravitates to John because the sailor is more reliable than his own mother.

Correspondent ‘B’ long ago made me aware that in Cinderella Liberty director Rydell seemingly seriously emulated the style of Robert Altman. ‘B’ theorized that Rydell decided to act in The Long Goodbye to learn what he could of the director’s modus operandi. Liberty is stylistically a departure from Rydell’s previous films. The presence of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and designer Leon Ericksen and the different feel of the score by John Williams suggests that the director liked what he learned from Altman.

The Twilight Time Blu-ray of Cinderella Liberty is a handsome encoding of this relaxing, life-affirming picture filmed in the less attractive portside environs of Seattle. The closest we get to a travelogue is a view of the Space Needle and a snow-capped mountain, both in the distance. The HD image plus improved scanning techniques make this Blu-ray look smoother than the earlier DVD; considering the quality of average release print lab work in the early 1970s, it likely looks a lot better on disc than it did when new.

This is cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond at his best. Flashing the film stock and using filters to soften the image, Zsigmond films at low light levels for the pool hall sequences, getting excellent results. Half-in shadow and lit by colored bar lights, Marsha Mason indeed looks like someone seen across a smoky room, barely a hairdo with a smile attached. Zsigmond makes achieving an artistic effect look easy. It’s as far from the old studio look as one can get.

John Williams’ jazzy soundtrack is a fine accompaniment, that perhaps suggests the good times Maggie remembers from New Orleans, where ‘one can feel the music vibrating in window panes.’ William’s music, with songs lyrics by Paul Williams, is present on a TT Isolated track.

Director-producer Rydell offers an enthusiastic commentary; he has every right to be proud of his picture. A character listed as ‘Gutteral Mischief’ is played by an actor credited as Marty Augustine. As that’s Rydell’s character name in the Robert Altman movie The Long Goodbye, we can be forgiven for assuming that it’s really Rydell in a cameo. An added bonus is an on-location featurette with behind-the-scenes footage.

Julie Kirgo’s liner notes attack the ‘hooker with a heart of gold’ notion. At one point, Dabney Coleman’s officer describes ‘women like Maggie’ in a string of disparaging obscenities. John later asks Maggie if she’s anything like that description, and her answer is, “Second generation.” The charm of Cinderella Liberty is that it asks us to ponder an important question: are people like Maggie Paul simply ‘broken,’ and doomed to disappoint themselves and others? Or can they be redeemed with a little love and faith?

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/cinderella-liberty/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/cinderella-liberty/The Iceman Comethhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/WvD6iNkL7xc/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-iceman-cometh/#respondMon, 23 Jul 2018 04:00:49 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34411John Frankenheimer directed this adaption of Eugene O’Neill’s play for the American Film Theatre, a company dedicated to bringing broadway to the movie house. The very essence of risky business, Frankenheimer’s 1973 film runs close to 4 hours and features some of Hollywood’s finest actors in decidedly un-Hollywood-like roles. Lee Marvin, Fredric March and the...

]]>John Frankenheimer directed this adaption of Eugene O’Neill’s play for the American Film Theatre, a company dedicated to bringing broadway to the movie house. The very essence of risky business, Frankenheimer’s 1973 film runs close to 4 hours and features some of Hollywood’s finest actors in decidedly un-Hollywood-like roles. Lee Marvin, Fredric March and the great Robert Ryan are all up to the task as is the fresh-faced Jeff Bridges just coming into his own with that same year’s The Last American Hero.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-iceman-cometh/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/the-iceman-cometh/ON MISADVENTURES AND BEING FUNNY IN AN ALTERNATE HOLLYWOOD: AN INTERVIEW WITH BIFFLE & SHOOSTER’S MICHAEL SCHLESINGERhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/GMbKCDX6dlo/
https://trailersfromhell.com/on-misadventures-and-being-funny-in-an-alternate-hollywood-an-interview-with-biffle-shoosters-michael-schlesinger/#commentsSat, 21 Jul 2018 19:40:30 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34397“Who are you?” “B-I-double F-iffle. Biffle! S-H-double O-ooster. Shooster! We’re Biffle and Shooster! Need we say more?” In 1928, the vaudeville comedy duo of Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster made the transition from the stage to the nascent medium of talking pictures with a pair of Vitaphone one-reelers. That move was a modest but immediate...

In 1928, the vaudeville comedy duo of Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster made the transition from the stage to the nascent medium of talking pictures with a pair of Vitaphone one-reelers. That move was a modest but immediate success, breaking ground on what would be a string of 20 comedy shorts made by the team for independent producer Sam Weinberg, which would both build on their reputations as worthy occupants of a comedy firmament anchored by stars like Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello, but also cement Weinberg’s standing as a producer who liked to lean a little too heavily upon the blueprint of others. (After a preview of their ninth short, Imitation of Wife, Laurel & Hardy producer Hal Roach approached Weinberg and gently suggested that he “try and be a little more original next time.”) In 1938, Biffle and Shooster parted ways with Weinberg, but they continued to work sporadically in films, including a cameo appearance in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), which was cut from the film’s original theatrical release.

All of the above sounds the typical trajectory of a vaudeville-to-the-movies comedy team career but for one thing—it never happened. Biffle and Shooster, themselves and their comedy shorts, are actually lovingly crafted fictions, built on a foundation created by actors Nick Santa Maria (Biffle) and Will Ryan (Shooster) and expanded into a series of actual shorts by producer-director-writer Michael Schlesinger, which have recently been collectively released by Kino Lorber on DVD and Blu-ray as The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster. (“Two Madcap Morons on a Mission of Mayhem!”) The collection consists of five of those 20 shorts (the five Schlesinger has filmed so far)—The Biffle Murder Case, a terrific riff on whodunits of the Philo Vance variety; Imitation of Wife, the duo’s aforementioned “tribute” to Laurel & Hardy; Schmo Boat, a late-period (1937) revue shot in two-color “Cinecolor”; Bride of Finkelstein, B&S’s dip into Universal monster/Abbott & Costello territory, which was, according to Schlesinger lore, deemed “too Jewish” by theaters in the South which refused to show it; and the team’s last collaboration, It’s a Frame-up!, which shows the boys to be as entertaining at the last as they were at the first, however hobbled they may have been by the accretion of recycled plots and drastically lowered budgets. (In the real world, It’s a Frame-up! was the first Biffle and Shooster short Schlesinger filmed.)

Misadventures is also a treasure trove of arcana for Biffle and Shooster fans—they’ll get their first peek at B&S’s second Vitaphone short, 1928’s First Things Last, as well as that Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World outtake, improbably unearthed from the Kramer estate, and an outtake from Wife spoken entirely in (badly phoneticized) Spanish. Plus, there’s a B&S Will Rogers PSA, a 1962 interview with the boys, plenty of bloopers, deleted scenes and outtakes, and complete audio commentaries for each short from Schlesinger, Santa Maria and Ryan.

It’s really peachy to have all these shorts collected together— Schlesinger’s craft at making them seem indisputably authentic to the period is a knockabout joy to behold, as are Ryan and Santa Maria’s fully committed performances. The Biffle and Shooster comedies have been created with such fealty to period style, production values, and even, most delightfully, wear-and-tear, that audiences not in on the joke going forward might easily assume that what they are watching is the real vintage deal, though featuring jokesters they may not precisely… remember. (I promise you, I have seen it happen.) However, as with real-life progenitors like Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, the Ritz Brothers et al., audiences may find that prolonged exposure to one Biffle and Shooster short after another can becoming trying. (There are, of course,plenty of folks for whom this will not be a problem.) My suggestion is programming a Biffle and Shooster short as a warm-up before the classic film of your choice—The Biffle Murder Case would pair up with any number of terrific comic mysteries, starting with The Thin Man (1934) or even The Garden Murder Case (1936), and of course Bride of Finklestein will whet the appetite for any number of Universal monster classics. And then you’ll be ready to dig into the delicious package of extras that Kino Lorber, along with Schlesinger and his team of impeccable actors and craftsmen, have put together.

Schlesinger himself is what I like to think of as a walking encyclopedia of Hollywood history (though far less musty than the average dormant World Book volume which may still be on your parents’ bookshelf), and that sensibility informs every lovingly recreated period detail of the Biffle and Shooster shorts. “I’ve pretty much run the gamut of the industry,” Schlesinger says, certainly a claim that’s far more authentic than anything he ever cooked up about Biffle and Shooster’s Hollywood history. After starting out in Ohio booking movie theaters, then shifting into distribution, marketing and production after the inevitable move to Los Angeles, Schlesinger soon (well, probably not soon from his perspective) developed a reputation as a pillar in the field of classic film distribution and restoration over 25 years working with MGM/UA, Paramount and Sony (aka Columbia Pictures). Some of the movies returned to theaters or restored for home video under his watch were a slew of Budd Boetticher westerns and Buster Keaton shorts, as well as trifles like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Citizen Kane (1941), White Dog (1982), The Conformist (1970), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), The Boy Friend (1971) and seemingly countless others. Working in Sony’s home entertainment division, he toiled to make numerous rare features, shorts and cartoons from the studio’s library available for the first time, and in 1993 he delivered the completed version of Orson Welles famously unfinished It’s All True to movie theaters. It’s a tribute to Schlesinger’s eclectic tastes and talents that he also wrote, produced and voice-directed the Americanized version of Godzilla 2000 (1999), which got such good reviews that even Toho Studios proclaimed Schlesinger’s monster a big improvement over their own released version. The emergence of Biffle and Shooster and the first produced short, It’s a Frame-up! (2012), was a natural development. “I was trying to make it as a screenwriter, but I don’t write rubbish, so that clearly was an impediment,” Schlesinger explains of his decision to bring Biffle and Shooster to life. “I finally had to make a picture on my own dime. Let’s see if it leads to anything…though it better be soon!”

Self-deprecating, informative, and entertaining to the last (pick up his audio commentary on last year’s Blu-ray of Billy Wilder’s One Two Three, if you don’t believe me), Michael Schlesinger is one of Hollywood’s genuine good guys. Recently I peppered this renaissance fella with some questions via e-mail vis-à-vis Biffle and Shooster, and, boy, did I get some answers.

Do you remember the moment, or the movie, that made you fall in love with the movies? Did you have parents who loved the movies?

Are you kidding? Eisenhower was president! I can’t even remember what I had for lunch yesterday. Anyway, it wasn’t a sudden “Aha!” moment, just a gradual growing love. I was an only child, so the TV set became my de facto sibling. My folks neither loved nor hated movies; they just went, because that’s what people did in those days. That said, I can definitely point to, of all pictures, The Satan Bug (1965) was the movie that cemented the idea in my head that this was what I wanted to do. Go figure.

Who, exactly, are Biffle and Shooster? Frequently when you hear people talk about these guys the names of Abbott and Costello are invoked, but I suspect the influences and roots run more extensively than that.

They’re a fairly conventional vaudeville comedy team: one rather dimmer than the other. They’re sort of an amalgam of all teams, with some of their own qualities, though they’re probably a bit closer to A&C than any of the others. I wanted not only for the shorts to be different from each other, but for them to be different as well, depending on the scenario. Thus, in Imitation of Wife, they’re like Laurel & Hardy, in Schmo Boat they’re Hope & Crosby, in It’s a Frame-Up! they’re the Stooges (or at least two of them), and so on. It was mainly to avoid repetition from setting in, as well as displaying the guys’ versatility.

Speaking of influences, one of the most delightful things about Biffle and Shooster is the seemingly endless vein of movie references and movie dialogue embedded in these shorts. What’s your favorite in-joke reference from any of the shorts? The most obscure one?

Oh, man, there are so many. Two I particularly adore are the Max Davidson “Scream” painting in Frame-up, and Biffle invoking The Susquehanna Hat Company in Schmo Boat. I also love when Biffle slips into a Bing Crosby impression. Never gets a laugh, but it puts me on the floor. As for obscure, maybe the reference to “six delicious flavors” in The Biffle Murder Case; that was Jell-O’s slogan for many years. Nobody gets it, but audiences in 1935 would have, and in any event, it’s not presented as a punch line, so it doesn’t really matter if people miss it. Also in Murder Case, the photo on the table is of S.S. Van Dine, whose Philo Vance stories we were spoofing. In fact, that whole short is laced with whodunit Easter eggs. Bride of Finkelstein, which is my favorite of the bunch, also has a lot of specific horror movie hat-tips. For example, when Finklestein enters, it’s to an orchestral arrangement of Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor—the exact same passage used for Karloff’s similar entrance in The Black Cat (1934). And of course, what would a good horror spoof be without a gorilla? Incidentally, the script merely said, “They do the mirror routine.” Nick and Chris Walas (the Academy Award-winning make-up artist who played the gorilla) worked that out on their own.

My favorite of the shorts is The Biffle Murder Case. I love everything about it, even the intro card describing the movie’s supposed history.

Those Blackhawk cards are important for setting up the short for audiences unfamiliar with this kind of comedy. Again, they weren’t necessarily intended to be seen all at once, especially in theatres.

And the great Jackson family in-joke, which I won’t spoil. And the special guest appearance by Detective Murphy, played by Robert Forster (“I got three sons and I’d kill ’em all and have a beer afterwards!”).

That’s Lieutenant Murphy! Don’t make me say it again!

But my favorite is Roosevelt, the family butler who, of course, is black. His surprised take during the dramatic stingers, when all the suspects get to look extra suspicious, is priceless. The whole short is a masterpiece not only of duplication of the sort of drawing-room murder mysteries like the Philo Vance stories, but it also leaves room for a lot of sharp observations about race and class, both of the time being referenced– the late ’30s– and current times.

Well, that was somewhat of a concession to the PC era. If we had a black servant going, “Yassuh, Boss!” and things like that, I’d be roasted on a spit. So, I wrote him as the kind of character Paul Robeson might have played. Alas, the actor I cast dropped out at the very last second, but that got us Todd as a replacement. He was terrific, but he was also several inches shorter, so Roosevelt went from being taller than everyone else to shorter than everyone else. I adjusted his character accordingly, and, since Todd shaves his head, added a line in which Nance addresses him as Stymie. That’s another film buff joke I love that hardly anybody laughs at. As for class, that reminds me of another obscure bit of business. Andrew suspects Roosevelt of sneaking drinks of his scotch. Roosevelt replies that it’s gin, and Andrew replies, “Oh, that’s alright, then.” That’s not a non sequitur gag. Back then, scotch was considered a gentleman’s drink and gin was more the beverage of the lower class. So, Andrew really wouldn’t care if Roosevelt was drinking it; he probably only kept it for company.

I’m fascinated by the visual and aural authenticity you manage to achieve in these shorts– the “earliest” Biffle & Shooster, First Things Last, is a real marvel in this regard. It’s no wonder that several people know who’ve seen them weren’t aware a first that these weren’t actual shorts from the ’20s and ’30s, but instead lovingly recreated homages.

I have an authenticity fetish. Do it right or don’t do it. And it can be done—all you have to do is want to do it. I can’t tell you how it drives me up the wall when I see a period piece and they get everything wrong. I’m fortunate to have a great D.P., Doug Knapp, who knows how to light for B&W, and Scott Cobb, a fabulous production designer. But the real hero is my editor, Bill Bryn Russell, who’s a one-man post-production house. He’s done all of Larry Blamire’s films, so he knows this territory well. I love playing around with color, sound, aspect ratios, etc., and he enjoys this stuff, too. On the Vitaphone short, I told him I wanted a slug at some point when they weren’t moving around. He not only put one in, but he even added a fake bad-splice jump. It looks completely real. He also dug up some of the cartoonish sound effects we used. It’s simply amazing what can be accomplished with digital editing nowadays.

How long does it usually take to get a B&S short from initial concept and screenplay to the finished product? You’ve made several of these now. Is the process getting any faster?

I can’t answer the question satisfactorily because most of the scripts were written months before shooting, and the editing and post went on for a long time because Bill was squeezing me in between his regular big-time gigs. We shot Frame-up in December of 2012 and all the others consecutively in July of 2014. They were all filmed in 3-4 days each, which is about what most Columbia two-reelers took, so I doubt we could hustle much more than that.

Those intro cards before each feature describe the movies in such loving detail, craftily intertwining real Hollywood history with your made-up version. I’d love to see a Biffle & Shooster feature in which they interact with your alternate Hollywood.

I’m kicking an idea for a feature around, but it’ll have to be somebody else’s money. I do have one short outlined called Vitaphonies where they’re turned loose in a movie studio, so that could address some of those issues. I’m also considering doing one of their radio shows as a podcast, which would give them a chance to have big-name guest stars via impressions.

Are your actors, Nick Santa Maria, who plays Benny Biffle, and Will Ryan, who plays Sam Shooster, as well-versed in Hollywood arcana and lore as their writer-director?

Without question. Like me, they eat, sleep, breathe and live this stuff. It’s in our DNA. Don’t forget, they actually “created” the characters, though they were kind of nebulous before I jumped in and fleshed them out.

The screenwriting credit for The Biffle Murder Case goes to Lou Breslow, a real screenwriter who wrote, among many other terrific movies, Murder, He Says (1944) starring Fred MacMurray and the great Marjorie Main, a movie you introduced me to at the first TCM Classic Film Festival by describing it as a parody of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 30 years before that movie was even made. I’ll always be grateful to you for making me aware of this movie, which has since become a personal favorite. But the Breslow touch in Murder Case is typical of your catch-all-of-old-Hollywood approach to these shorts. For those who may not know how IMDb works, who was Lou Breslow?

First of all, except for B&S and executive producer Sam Weinberg, all the names in the opening credits are real. Again, I want them to seem on the level. As for Breslow, I’m a huge fan. He started as a writer, and eventually directed as well. He did a lot of films I love, including No More Women (1934), 36 Hours to Kill(1936), You Can Never Tell (1951)and Gift of Gab (1934), and wrote for Laurel and Hardy, the Stooges and Bob Hope, among others. He had a terrific ear for dialogue, but also was a great constructionist. Most of the writers and directors in the fake credits match the content; for example, for the ones which blatantly rip-off other shorts, I use Clyde Bruckman as the writer. He was quite well-known for, shall we say, recycling.

What constitutes good comedy for the creator of Biffle and Shooster?

For starters, don’t insult my intelligence, don’t bore me, and above all don’t fall back on attitude or profanity as a crutch. You can be dirty, but at least do it as part of a joke. I dig Keaton and Lloyd, but I also love Michelle Wolf and Jim Jefferies. Once you’ve established your characters and a story arc, you can do whatever you want—as long as it’s funny. Still, the greatest TV series ever is The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the greatest movie ever is It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I can’t even hope to aspire to those heights.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/on-misadventures-and-being-funny-in-an-alternate-hollywood-an-interview-with-biffle-shoosters-michael-schlesinger/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/on-misadventures-and-being-funny-in-an-alternate-hollywood-an-interview-with-biffle-shoosters-michael-schlesinger/The Day Afterhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/6UthOLik8j4/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-day-after/#commentsSat, 21 Jul 2018 15:42:17 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34393 A hundred million viewers tuned in to ABC back in ’83 to find out if the world would end with a bang or a whimper. Edward Hume and Nicholas Meyer’s daring docudrama reacquainted Americans with their status as hostages in a global game of nuclear roulette. Gruesome nuclear annihilation visuals complement fine performances led...

A hundred million viewers tuned in to ABC back in ’83 to find out if the world would end with a bang or a whimper. Edward Hume and Nicholas Meyer’s daring docudrama reacquainted Americans with their status as hostages in a global game of nuclear roulette. Gruesome nuclear annihilation visuals complement fine performances led by Jason Robards. The tense, thoughtful show is presented in separate TV and theatrical versions.

How did the most-seen (100 million viewers) TV movie of all time come about? An ABC executive wanted to follow up up the ‘hot topic’ trend of his network’s miniseries Roots, so a topical Nuclear Attack movie was proposed. The project fell into the hands of the dependable director Nicholas Meyer, who would keep faith with the original concept even against the network’s ‘Standards and Practices’ lawyers. The name star Jason Robards signed on for the controversial show “because it’s better than signing a petition.” And even though the network buried their presentation in disclaimers and apologies, they broadcast it fairly uncut and unadulterated. Cue the morbid nuclear horrors, to shake up America.

Ronald Reagan certainly helped 1983’s The Day After into the TV phenomenon it became. The President’s more aggressive stance against the Soviet Union had both ‘Olive Branch’ and Strategic Defense Initiative components and he asked to have White House screenings before the broadcast on November 20. I remember having to listen to conservative businessmen debate the film’s issues in my neighborhood barbershop. The depressing opinions ranged all the way from, ‘the movie will weaken America’s defense,’ to ‘the moviemakers are traitors.’

The Day After was the right film for the time. In the late 1970s TV movies were becoming a conduit for mostly liberal-themed ‘event’ productions. Judging by the volume of letters to newspapers, miniseries about slavery and Nazi crimes proved that average Americans could be counted on to be woefully uninformed about most any important social topic at hand. Above and beyond the jokes about ‘disease of the week’ shows, TV movies about AIDS, spousal abuse, drug issues, child molestation, etc. were touted as performing an important public service.

In 1983 we still had an independent PBS TV system; in Los Angeles entire evenings were occasionally devoted to films about big issues, like the Holocaust and the nuclear threat. KCET is where I got my first exposure to original death camp docus, and Peter Watkins’ must-see suppressed BBC docudrama classic The War Game.

Of all the earlier ‘nuke threat’ movies, ABC’s The Day After is modeled most on The War Game. By 1983 Kubrick’s black comedy Doctor Strangelove was likely the doomsday drama most remembered by filmgoers. But it and the annihilation soap opera On The Beach were over two decades removed from the scene. It’s safe to say that the amorphous public at large was so uninformed on the nuke threat, that when Ronald Reagan in March of 1983 proposed a fantasy missile defense program, actually dubbed ‘Star Wars’ by the press, he got an easy pass.

Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach spread the (debated) notion that a nuclear war would exterminate mankind. Strangelove floated the idea that human nature is so unreliable, just having the weapons in hand was a suicidal game of Russian Roulette. Watkins’ The War Game accused the UK government of promoting an absurdly useless civil defense program, so as to lull the population into complacency. The Day After combines aspects of Beach and Game. Its media-savvy soap opera / survivalist ordeal is a convincing scenario of what might happen should a breakdown between NATO and East Germany result in an all-out nuclear exchange.

With little in the way of government cooperation, ABC licensed completed documentaries to depict the military action on the day WWIII begins. Scenes put us inside a missile silo and with the crew of an airborne command jet that prepares to attack the Soviets during an international crisis. We meet a number of Americans in Kansas City and the college town of Lawrence, sixty miles away. Not only is a military air base in the vicinity, the surrounding farmland is also dotted with dozens of missile silos, all of which are prime attack targets. People try to go about their daily routines. K.C. resident Doctor Russell Oakes (Jason Robards) thinks about his daughter Marilyn (Kyle Aletter) and his wife Helen (Georgeann Johnson) on his way to Lawrence’s college hospital to give a seminar. K.C. student Stephen Klein (Steve Guttenberg) decides to go home during the crisis. The Hendry family farm is directly adjacent to a silo, where Airman Billy McCoy (William Allen Young) finds his leave cancelled when his unit goes on alert. We see the farm family the Dahlbergs in more detail. Jim and Eve Dahlberg (John Cullum & Bibi Besch) will be marrying off their daughter Denise (Lori Lethin) in just a few days, and are concerned that she’s jumping the gun by staying out all night with her student boyfriend Bruce (Jeff East). Preoccupied by the TV news, Jim does what he can to prepare for an attack. Eve remains in denial of the facts — nuclear war is just too unthinkable.

The attack comes before the halfway point of the two-hour picture. As everybody but William F. Buckley readily admitted, the outcome is not rosy. Multiple thermonuclear bombs fall in the Kansas area, and the city is obliterated. Returning to Lawrence, Dr. Oakes tries to help nurse Nancy Bauer (JoBeth Williams) and Dr. Sam Hachiya (Calvin Jung) at the school hospital, which is without power and supplies, with thousands of wounded arriving. Lost on the roads, Stephen Klein is taken into the Dahlberg shelter. Jim’s son was blinded by the blast, and Denise cannot handle the likelihood that her boyfriend Bruce is gone forever. Maddened by life in the dark cellar, she runs outside, and by the time Stephen brings her back they’re both covered in deadly dust. Billy McCoy joins refugees walking to Lawrence. He’s told that every other town, including his home in Salinas, has been wiped out.

Over in the Lawrence science lab, teacher Joe Huxley (John Lithgow) confirms that the EMP Effect has neutralized all electronics. They patch together an old tube radio but pick up no signals at first. As the days roll on, those exposed to the open air before the radiation levels dropped begin to suffer from lethal radiation sickness. Exhaustion causes Dr. Oakes to collapse. At a meeting of farmers that have survived, Jim Dahlberg finds that the official requirements to begin radiation-free agriculture are completely impractical. By now, lawless scavengers are turning to the countryside in search of whatever food can be found.

Half of the cast of characters make an abrupt exit in the attack, and now others begin dropping out of sight, their deaths unrecorded. In the bleak finish, we’re left little in the way of hope. Expectant mother Alison Ransom (Amy Madigan) delivers her baby in a crowded room, not knowing what sort of future it can expect. When we last see the Dahlberg women, they’re hearing gunfire from somewhere on their farm.

The Day After accomplishes its goal of demonstrating that nuclear war would at the very least deprive us of our semi-civilized existence. As the personalities of vital, caring people disintegrate, we wonder if those instantly vaporized were luckier than the survivors. Robards, Guttenberg, Lori Lethin and William Allen Young succumb to horrid radiation effects. The show gives viewers four minutes of violent attack scenes, and then another hour of people we care about suffering in their homes, trying to give aid to others, or drifting on the roads soaking up radiation from the nuclear fallout.

The production is epic in scope. Producer Robert Papazian secured enormous cooperation from Lawrence, Kansas, which allowed streets to be blocked for action scenes and dressed for post-bomb devastation. A stretch of divided highway was shut down for the excellently visualized scenes of Dr. Oakes caught on the freeway between cities. Thousands of Lawrentians (?) took part in a Gone With the Wind- like crane shot that reveals the floor of a large indoor arena completely covered with the sick, injured and dying. Even though most of the film just shows small rooms crowded with people, the film never feels like a discount ‘end of the world’ picture. The misery is spread across a lot of faces.

The special effects offered are brutally affecting, despite not being state of the art. Working with a very limited budget, optical expert Robert Blalock came up with graphic depictions of multiple fireball explosions and mushroom clouds, stylistically bleaching the screen in high-contrast imagery to suggest great heat and light. Every available launch stock shot is sourced for a montage of scores of missiles rising from silos and vaulting into the sky. They appear to be dependable products, made in America. Director Meyer stages impressive scenes of panic on the ground, leaving space for telling glimpses of old war memorials, and a symbolic slow-motion white horse, as in ‘behold a pale horse.’

The creative effects are more expressive than realistic. Shots of exploding buildings and skies of fire are culled from every stock library within reach. Flashes of newsreel conflagrations are intercut with movie special effects, even a shot of a soldier dodging flames from the old The War of the Worlds. To depict the moment when downtown Kansas City is hit point-blank by a thermonuclear blast, the film resorts to a complete abstraction. When New York was bombed in Fail-Safe, editor Ralph Rosenblum confected a ‘time freeze’ effect with smash zooms and freeze-frames. The Day After makes time stand still as well, for a montage of X-Ray obliterations. Individuals and groups of people, caught in everyday situations, are instantly vaporized. What apparently would happen in a micro-second becomes a flurry of extinctions, complete with sound effects of screams. It’s nightmarishly effective — the victims are for a few frames revealed as skeletons, an effect once associated with funny cartoons depicting electric shock. It’s not funny here.

Director Meyer nails dozens of dramatic images. Missiles arc into the air over a Lawrence sports stadium — how many of the spectators were really aware that their town was surrounded by such weaponry? The Hendry children watch awestruck as a rocket launches only a few hundred feet away from their home. The once good-looking Stephen lifts the cap from his now-bald head; both he, Denise and Billy McCoy could now pass for refugees from a zombie movie. Just a few days after the attack, Denise finds her farmyard coated in lethal white ash and littered with dead animals. The strongest image-thought in the whole picture is the sight of housewife Eve Dahlberg screaming in protest as her husband forcibly drags her downstairs. The film eventually makes a genre connection with the more commercial, exploitative Mad Max franchise when Jim Dahlberg finds a group of sullen, near-feral scavengers feeding on one of his last living cows. Minus the high-powered automobiles, we can easily imagine that the landscape may for a time be populated by ruthless warlords.

The English follow-up Threads (1984) is practically an apology for the national ban on The War Game. Transposing the exact same scenario to a British industrial town, with local adjustments: its young romance crosses economic lines. The much longer post-attack story sees a pitiful attempt by civil authorities to do good, when they’re basically buried in their underground bunker. The young bride’s story is projected much farther into the future. A few years later, the thread of human civilization has simply been broken off — her child will live the life of a grub-seeking animal.

The Day After was shown on one night in a three-hour time slot. As if fearful that viewers might take the film’s message to heart, ABC followed the broadcast with a major discussion led by Nightline’s Ted Koppel, with a VIP panel of experts: scientist Carl Sagan, Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, Robert McNamara, General Brent Scowcroft and William F. Buckley, Jr.. Buckley refuted the film’s pessimism, simply saying that nuclear deterrence would prevent any such war.

Sagan brought up the concept of Nuclear Winter in this very public arena. Nicholas Meyer would later say that his production team was unaware of the theorized phenomenon, which plays a major role in the gloomy and cold future of the survivors of Threads.

The list of must-see morbid nuclear peril pictures isn’t very long; they rattle some viewers but excite others that welcome the scenario as just another opportunity for post-apocalyptic thrills. James Cameron’s Terminator 2 features a spectacularly fearsome nuclear attack on downtown Los Angeles as a sidebar rumination. The disturbing nightmare becomes just another titillating violent action set piece. Interestingly, the most compellingly heartbreaking nuclear terror picture of this time is Lynne Littman’s Testament, which was produced for TV but instead released theatrically on November 4, 1983, just a couple of weeks before The Day After’s airdate. In Testament a small California town is spared any direct attack effects, but slowly dies as the radiation levels rise.

The miniseries is now often recalled in connection with Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Some suggest that it swayed the President toward an arms treaty but others say he simply stepped up his ‘Star Wars’ rhetoric. Reagan began as a radio broadcaster back in the 1930s. His detractors like to remember his August 11, 1984 weekly Saturday Address on National Public Radio, where he made an off-air joke about happily destroying Russia. It was, of course, just a joke, and Reagan was a fairly responsible guardian of the nuclear attack codes.

The KL Studio ClassicsBlu-ray of The Day After does right by ABC’s famed TV movie, which was previously released in 2004, on an okay plain-wrap MGM DVD. The new HD release has two separate discs. The first carries the flat-formatted TV cut, and the second disc has the theatrical cut, which is five minutes longer. The show looks attractive in both cuts. A closer look may find more differences, but I mostly saw scenes re-arranged, not re-edited. The attack scene is identical in both cuts, exactly three minutes and fifty seconds from the first detonation to the fade-out. I suspect that material was just dropped — the TV version opens with the main titles while the theatrical cut begins with a documentary scene inside the Air Force command & control jet.

The theatrical cut is formatted for widescreen, which I found more pleasing but others may not. The movie’s images are in good shape but they are not pretty — with the combination of docu and real-life footage, and somewhat variable special effects, the show has an agreeably patchy feel. There’s not a lot of music, but the tension rises sharply when ominous rhythms join the buildup to the attack sequence. Agrarian ‘Americana’ themes representing the farmland were adapted from Virgil Thompson’s symphony score for Pare Lorentz’s The River.

A lively Lee Gambin and Tristan Jones commentary is on the Theatrical cut. The scattershot discussion starts with TV movies and often veers far afield to include long talks about only tangentially- related movies and people — a full rundown on Kings Row and wild references to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? They announce early on that they’ll be talking about cut material. I listened faithfully but think I missed it; wikipedia alludes to dropped scenes depicting a child’s nightmare. They do have good a handle on post-Apocalyptic films, and we agree with their apt linkup between The Day After and the Mad Max franchise. The Australian commentators also talk about parts of their country left uninhabitable due to UK nuke testing.

On the TV cut a new interview with JoBeth Williams gives us twelve minutes of her candid thoughts about the production, getting to work with Jason Robards, etc. She becomes emotional at the end, and almost angry, when referring to our current President’s nuclear dare rhetoric with the dictator of North Korea. We note that the network news consistently illustrates the Korea showdown with Day After- like images of multiple Korean rocket launch tests.

Director Nicholas Meyer’s 29-minute interview piece is splendid stuff. He covers his entire experience on the show, including his negotiations with ABC’s Standards and Practices over scenes that center on Denise’s diaphragm device, without ever showing it or calling it by name. Meyer still looks young, and has a sharp mind. He says that doing the show as a ‘banal’ TV movie about ordinary people was the right way to communicate to America. Writing a book about nuclear war isn’t effective because the people you want to reach don’t read books… but they’ll watch a soap opera.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-day-after/feed/16https://trailersfromhell.com/the-day-after/Supergirl (1984)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/_6hvV4eKo9Q/
https://trailersfromhell.com/supergirl-1984/#commentsSat, 21 Jul 2018 15:41:59 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34391 We’re told that the first live- action feature film super-heroine was the marvelous Helen Slater, whose fine presence redeems this last film in the Salkind Superman franchise. CineSavant likes it for the right reasons — his very young kids adored it — but can see its turnip screenwriting and frayed corners showing through. The...

We’re told that the first live- action feature film super-heroine was the marvelous Helen Slater, whose fine presence redeems this last film in the Salkind Superman franchise. CineSavant likes it for the right reasons — his very young kids adored it — but can see its turnip screenwriting and frayed corners showing through. The release combines a 125-minute Blu-ray with an overstuffed 139-minute DVD.

I got caught up short about ten years ago when doing extras for the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I don’t care very much for that film personally, and indulged myself with a sarcastic discussion of its weaknesses. I found out in short order that I’d given offense to several friends about ten years younger than me. They’d all seen it at age 5 through 10 or so, loved it, and didn’t appreciate my negative attitude. My opinion hasn’t changed, but my respect for filmgoer nostalgia has.

Nothing cinematic is stronger than the love for movies one was delighted to see ‘click’ with one’s kids when they were small. Think the scene in Mad Men where Don Draper finally connects with his son over a shared matinee of Planet of the Apes. In 1981, when my daughter was two and I was earning a pittance as an editing assistant, our no-cost Saturday entertainment consisted of riding to work together on my bicycle and watching videotapes of Dumbo and Superman — I didn’t have a VHS player but the office did. We must have seen them twenty times. Later, I took my three kids to see a special Cannon showing of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. It didn’t matter that the story was weak and the effects terrible, it was a great occasion. But the strongest moment of that kind was in 1984, when we went to a now-defunct Nabe theater on Western Avenue for a matinee of Supergirl. My oldest son was three, and it was his first movie. His older sister took charge, sitting with her arm around him and whispering (very softly) in his ear to talk him through things he wasn’t getting.

Supergirl is not exactly Oscar material either, but that didn’t matter. My little son clearly fell deeply in love with Supergirl / Linda Lee. We had him cheering when good stuff happened. When he realized the show was over, he cried because Supergirl was going away. Unbreakable memories.

The movie has a lot of lamebrain comedy and some passages suffer from a lack of imagination. Its effects will not impress compared to the modern Marvel and DC pictures. They look better now on Blu-ray — I remember the mattes, etc., looking more washed-out on the big screen. The saving difference is that it’s a good picture for small children. The level of jeopardy wasn’t steep, at least not with his kindergarten-age sister gently whispering EGBOK in his ear.

Parents ought to think this idea over a bit before they subject four-year-olds to movies that glorify violence, sanctify combat and reduce every problem to an absolute good vs. evil conflict. The new Mister Rogers movie Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is doing well because it fulfills the need of the hour: people really want to see some hope in the world again. It’s important for kids to watch non-ironic movies with decent values, ones where there’s a clear benefit and even a glamour for being Good. I have to admit that I encouraged my kids to cheer at Christopher Reeve’s line, “I always tell the truth, Lois.”

If the movie were twice as dumb it would still work beautifully, because kids will instantly relate to Helen Slater as Supergirl. She’s as true-blue and noble as her male cousin from Krypton, and she comes with her own distinct feminine personality. The recent CBS TV show took pains to update its heroine as a feisty female role model but also saddled her with a permanent war on her hands — she’s yet another lone warrior trying to save the world from evil conspiracies, etc.. Yes, the 1984 movie isn’t exactly liberated — it was never going to win medals for making boyfriend issues the main motivation for all the female characters. But Supergirl herself exercises restraint, and an elegant restraint at that. Slater’s heroine works because she fulfills the need for a role model who embodies simple, uncomplicated virtues.

The screenplay by David Odell (he wrote this!) plays as if he warped to accommodate the story’s star villain, and then further distorted the affair with unnecessary, leaden comedy relief. In another (underwater?) dimension, survivors of the lost planet Krypton live in the crystalline Argo City, which is powered by a magical device called the Omegahedron, a cross between a Fabergé egg and a tennis ball. Scientist Zaltar (Peter O’Toole) foolishly allows young Kara (Helen Slater, straight from an ABC Afternoon Special) to play with the Omegahedron, and she immediately loses the thing. Argo City is doomed, so Kara’s parents Alura and Zor-El (Mia Farrow & Simon Ward) let her strike out on her own to get it back. Kara emerges from the other dimension in the U.S.A., newly rebranded as Supergirl and enhanced with the familiar super-powers. She takes a cover identity as Linda Lee at a girls’ boarding school, where she meets Lois Lane’s cheerful niece Lucy Lane (Maureen Teefy of Fame and Grease 2), and Lucy’s sort-of boyfriend Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure).

But, omigosh, the unprincipled spiritualist Selena (Faye Dunaway) has come into possession of the Omegahedron. Her knowledge of Black Magic (!) gives her access to its powers, and she’s soon running amuck with dreams of world domination. Selena allows her gullible acolyte / informed warlock Nigel (Peter Cook of Bedazzled) to help her develop her power-mad skills, and then victimizes him. She sweeps her sidekick Bianca (Brenda Vaccaro of Midnight Cowboy) up in her mad schemes, ignoring Bianca’s many pleas for moderation.

Selena’s clumsy ‘evil’ tryouts include making a construction machine run amuck in the local town, but her big goof is putting a love spell on the handsome but rather stupid school groundskeeper Ethan (Hart Bochner, later of Die Hard). Selena has another reason to become furious when the spell inadvertently makes Ethan go gaga over Linda Lee / Supergirl. When Selena finally gets her act together, she conjures herself a magic palace atop a colossal new mountain outside the town. Turning the town into a police state, she imprisons most of the young cast. The new empress of darkness neutralizes Supergirl by banishing her to The Phantom Zone. There Supergirl finds a discouraged and despairing Zaltar, in self-exile.

Supergirl’s main problem is a script that makes Faye Dunaway into a feeble clown instead of a formidable adversary. It’s a camped-up role in a bad satanic sitcom. Attending Selena and taking her abuse is a bored-looking Peter Cook. The unfortunate Brenda Vaccaro tries her utmost to do something with Bianca’s dozens of Ethel Mertz- like sidebar comments. That the relatively inoffensive Bianca should be consumed by the ‘Shadow Demon,’ and the warlock Nigel is forgiven, doesn’t feel right. Poor Dunaway rants and raves as the thoughtlessly conceived Selena, who director Jeannot Szwarc continues to feature in laughable ‘stylized’ compositions, conjuring her spells bathed in mystic lighting and strong winds, etc..

Peter O’Toole picks up his paycheck and runs, but the kids have more interesting scenes to play. Their gee-whiz enthusiasm meshes well with the corny Nancy Drew- like teen activities. Marc McClure shows good spirit; I hope his Superman contract compensated him well for this picture. Hart Bochner’s role couldn’t be more humiliating if they pulled his pants down and shoved a pie in his face. Older movies aimed at girls routinely provided teen heroines with pretty-boy puppy love objects, but Bochner’s doofus Ethan looks especially silly. Ethan was likely thought to be a refreshing feminist reversal on conventions. Women in thrillers have always been passive, ineffectual sponge-heads, present only to look pretty and scream on cue. It ought to be fun to see a handsome male lead treated the same way, but it’s not.

To compensate for a lack of standout action set-pieces, the movie emphasizes Supergirl’s subjective experience. She expresses sensitivity and affection for this new planet she’s visiting — her cousin Superman never stopped to smell the flowers or soak up a glorious sunset. Kara / Linda / Supergirl has good feeling for her friends and carries on a sweet interaction with the deranged Ethan. But she never loses sight of her goal to recover the spinning powerball and save Argo City. I hear she’s running for Congress this Fall.

This is the last of the Salkinds’ official DC series, and the special effects are all over the place. The flying effects are not bad — Zoran Perisic’s zooming front-projection tricks aren’t billed, but these shots look almost as good. The stuntwomen flying on wires do well enough, but several shots slip through where Supergirl’s progress across the sky looks a little shaky. Slater’s acrobatic landings aren’t as boringly perfect as those of a Marvel hero — which is a good thing.

Nobody is going to think that making a single ordinary construction skiploader move by remote control is acceptable for a ‘super’ action scene. The visuals en route to Earth and in the Phantom Zone are barely adequate. Selena seems to share Dr. Julian Karswell’s skill for conjuring a demon from hell, and a nighttime sequence of an invisible monster threatening the school is done quite well. This final demon is a puppet obscured by distorting lenses, and it’s just not that impressive. But the bright and un-clouded honesty of Helen Slater’s performance pulls us through mostly anything, even when she is anamorphically- stretched in cheesy effect shots in the claws of a demon.

The show may be cheap in some respects but there are some really great effects, accomplished by miniatures expert Derek Meddings and the matte painter Doug Ferris. The establishing shots of Selena’s towering mountain fortress are really, really good — the camera pans from a dialogue scene to reveal the magic mountain behind a snarl of telephone wires, etc. and then tilts up seemingly forever. Supergirl zooms up the face of the mountain as a tiny dot with a cape. These shots are just great — it isn’t immediately apparent how they were accomplished.

What’s more, the magic mountain captures the imaginative vibe of the old Superman comics of the 1950s. We don’t need things to look real. They need to be ‘amazing.’

The Warner Archive CollectionBlu-ray of Supergirl carries one Blu-ray and one DVD. The Blu-ray boasts a much-improved HD scan of the long (125 min.) ‘International Cut.’ On the ‘extra’ DVD, the Director’s Cut is a whopping 139 minutes in duration. It appeared on an earlier (2000) Anchor Bay DVD. It throws in a lot more of Selena’s machinations, and some extra scenes at the Girls’ School. I only skipped about, but found a couple of extended scenes that mostly feel like padding. The extra footage hammers the story out pretty thin, if you get my drift.

The International Version is fine. The original American theatrical cut (105 minutes) is not present; I’m not sure it has ever been released on videodisc. I wonder if some dialogue lines were deleted for America, as when Selena makes an unfunny joke at the expense of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Blu-ray carries the extras. The first is an hourlong TV show to promote the 1984 release. All the stars and filmmakers offer testimonials to the film’s unique qualities; the real reason to watch are the Behind-the-Scenes shots. The producers did give Helen Slater a reasonable press build-up for the film, which is nice.

Director Jeannot Szwarc and consultant Scott Michael Bosco are on a commentary also sourced from the 2000 DVD. Szwarc points out all the effects shots and reminds us that the film’s designer was the esteemed Richard MacDonald. He also says that Demi Moore was up for the part of Lucy Lane, but dropped out for a Michael Caine movie, which I assume was the underage nudity-fest Blame it on Rio.

An original trailer is present as well. As it’s forced to showcase Faye Dunaway at the expense of Helen Slater, it’s got structural issues. Three years earlier Dunaway entered the Phantom Zone of camp ridicule with Mommie Dearest, but for my money her real bury-it-and-don’t-look-back performance is here. Most critical analyses simply say that the movie ‘wasn’t well received.’ They obviously didn’t ask my delighted, lovesick 3-year old.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/supergirl-1984/feed/5https://trailersfromhell.com/supergirl-1984/Meet Me at the Astorhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/2BLqUHAQKtI/
https://trailersfromhell.com/meet-me-at-the-astor/#commentsSat, 21 Jul 2018 15:41:43 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34387 CineSavant poaches on Greenbriar Picture Shows territory with a quick slideshow of photos from New Yawk, New Yawk, where once upon a time, any old film release might get a gigantic ‘your name in lights’ opening on the Great White Way. This photo idea won’t be a trend at CineSavant, but it is a...

CineSavant poaches on Greenbriar Picture Shows territory with a quick slideshow of photos from New Yawk, New Yawk, where once upon a time, any old film release might get a gigantic ‘your name in lights’ opening on the Great White Way.

This photo idea won’t be a trend at CineSavant, but it is a welcome break. It came about because long-time correspondent ‘B’ wanted to assure me that some movies I had described as marginal, actually opened big in New York. To prove to me that the Louis De Rochemont social issue movie Lost Boundaries wasn’t a micro-release seen by nearly nobody (which seems to be the fate of so many pictures today), “B” sent along this color photo of the gigantic electric billboard at the Astor Theater, presumably in early July of 1949.

The Astor Theater

“B” wrote, “Back in the day — when ‘The Great White Way’ was truly a light show beyond belief — the Astor, and its sister house the Victoria down the block, often sported amazingly complex marquees and electrical signs to promote current attractions. Here are some samples.”

Built in 1906, The Astor was originally a legit house. In April of 1913, the theatre hosted its first motion picture screening, the Italian-produced feature adaptation of Quo Vadis? This apparently ran for months. In 1925 it permanently became a movie theatre — I think Loew’s owned it for many years — and that year played The Big Parade for an astounding 96 weeks. That’s longer than The Sound of Music played the Rivoli, though both Around the World in 80 Days (also at the Rivoli) and This Is Cinerama (at the Broadway and Warner) would have somewhat longer B’way runs.

This fairly amazing photo just below is part of a shot used as a postcard, probably from the Fall of 1952. You will note that Limelight is playing at the Astor, in one of the movie’s very few theatrical engagements in America in the ’50s. But, wait — who the heck is Charles Brade?

It’s a case of Soviet-style revisionism, albeit on a minor scale: the photo has been retouched (!) to remove Charlie Chaplin’s name for the planned postcard. Chaplin had become so controversial, and the editorial attacks on him so fierce, that he had already departed the country before the picture opened. The State Department revoked his re-entry permit. I guess that I can be counted on to jump at any chance to talk about the blacklisting era.

By the way, the jet plane above the marquee for The Four Poster next door at the Victoria, is being prepared for David Lean’s Breaking the Sound Barrier.

And here’s a shot of the space above the Astor and the Victoria in use as a single giant poster, for the June 13, 1967 premiere of the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. A few years back working on a Barbra Streisand project, I saw most of the alternate unused film and video footage taken of her legendary Concert in Central Park, which took place on June 17. Opening the concert is a noted aerial helicopter shot, which eventually reaches the park to look down at the mobs in the concert area. About a minute earlier in the uncut 35mm camera roll, the helicopter passes over the Astor. Even from several thousand feet up, the giant 007 marquee looks enormous.

I just like these photos, of features big and small. It looks as if producer-distributor Samuel Goldwyn had a lock on the Astor if he wanted it to push a particular picture. Would a show we remember as not doing well — Edge of Doom, for example — play to full houses on Broadway just because of the venue? I have to admit that whenever some disc comes up with scenes taken on Broadway, or any Main Street anywhere, I’m known to slow the player to 1/8th speed, just to see what’s showin’ at the Bijou. ‘Special Guest Films’ visible at the Victoria or elsewhere are Bogart’s Knock on Any Door, Kirk Douglas’s Act of Love, Bergman’s Joan of Arc, Goldwyn’s Our Very Own, and The Window.

After looking at all the pictures, I feel like stopping by that corner, for some Maxwell House Coffee or a drink at Benedict’s, or maybe a Mayflower Doughnut! Thanks to ‘B’ for all the detailed information. The images are taken from the web at large and no rights are implied.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/meet-me-at-the-astor/feed/5https://trailersfromhell.com/meet-me-at-the-astor/Scream of Fearhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/Rb6kUm5MPfA/
https://trailersfromhell.com/scream-of-fear/#commentsFri, 20 Jul 2018 04:00:37 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=3637“Psycho” spawned a cottage industry of twist-ending killer-thrillers, and this modest Hammer entry is one of the best. Psycho’s unconventional ad campaign also led to gambits like this one, pretending the movie was just too scary to show any actual footage in the trailer!

]]>“Psycho” spawned a cottage industry of twist-ending killer-thrillers, and this modest Hammer entry is one of the best. Psycho’s unconventional ad campaign also led to gambits like this one, pretending the movie was just too scary to show any actual footage in the trailer!

]]>TFH Fearless Leader Joe Dante very astutely tip-toes around Larry Cohen’s stylistic filmmaking identity early on in King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen. Dante notes, “I would hardly call him the John Cassavetes of exploitation movies, but he does have a certain raw, visceral, realistic style.” Indeed, Larry Cohen’s signature film, Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), feels like what would happen if John Cassavetes directed a Ray Harryhausen film. And movie fans the world over are all the better for that most unlikely of authorial fusions!

For cineastes in LA, King Cohen debuts Friday, July 20th, at Laemmle’s Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre. There will be supplemental shows on the 23rd at the NoHo 7, and the Laemmle Monica on the 26th. It will expand to other select markets on July 27th (keep a sharp eye on the flick’s official site for further screening details). The rest of you can procure it wherever movies are streamed starting on August 14th. CineSavant guest critic Alex Kirschenbaum debuts with his King Cohen review.

Producer/director Steve Mitchell’s spirited, affectionate tribute to one of the more esoteric American exploitation directors, King Cohen spotlights a true original with a movie-by-movie breakdown of TFH Guru Cohen’s filmography, peppered with insights from family, friends, fellow filmmakers, plus assorted cast and crew members. TFH Gurus Dante, Rick Baker (creator of the mutant baby in It’s Alive), Mick Garris, and John Landis number among the many Hollywood luminaries who appear in front of the camera in several illuminating interviews.

Some of the most fun King Cohen content is the retroactive back-and-forth, the memories recalled through rose-tinted glasses, where conflicting anecdotes are presented by various folks. One of Larry’s favorite collaborators was NFL defensive back-turned action star Fred Williamson, with whom he collaborated on Black Caesar and its sequel Hell Up In Harlem (both 1973), and Original Gangstas (1996). Williamson and Larry Cohen have very different takes on whether or not Cohen threw himself over the hood of a car to demonstrate the relative safety of a tricky guerrilla stunt during production on Hell Up In Harlem.

A recurring theme in Larry Cohen’s guerrilla filmography is the time-honored low-budget moviemaking tradition of “stealing” coverage. Put simply, that practice entails filming on a location without a permit. The high point of this is when Cohen enlisted avant garde comedian Andy Kaufmann to infiltrate a 5,000-officer strong NYPD parade in the introduction of God Told Me To (1976).

Mitchell’s cinematographer, David C.P. Chan, captures some great candid moments of Cohen mingling amongst rabid fans at a convention and confidently gliding through his beautiful house, which incidentally was the location for his directorial debut, the darkly funny 1972 Yaphet Kotto home burglary film Bone. Chan’s imagery is complimented capably by a lively original score, courtesy of composer Joe Kraemer. Kraemer’s themes oscillate from light mid-century jazz to the movie’s driving theme, an energetic ’70s disco-channeling instrumental ditty.

The film functions as a great primer on Larry Cohen’s life and career, which has really run the genre gamut. After logging much of his Manhattanite youth in front of movie theater screens, Cohen initially harbored aspirations of being a stand-up comic, inspired by Danny Kaye and Sid Caesar. Cohen employed what actress Traci Lords calls his “very wacky sense of humor” across several small comedy clubs in and around New York City. Cohen changed tactics, and became an NBC page. When Cohen was just 17, he sold his first produced TV script to Kraft Theatre, an Ed McBain adaptation called “The Eighty Seventh Precinct.” Because this was the era of live television, Cohen the writer was present when cameras rolled on his scripts — an experience he notes was invaluable in his eventual development as a director.

After 15 years of writing for television and film, and 15 years of frustration in watching other directors improperly interpret his material for the screen, Cohen transitioned to becoming a multi-hyphenate as the writer-director of Bone. Though the bizarre Bone tanked, Cohen’s sophomore film Black Caesar was a trailblazing blaxploitation hit. Soon thereafter, Cohen hit his stride with the cost-effective It’s Alive horror trilogy (1974, 1978, 1987), the tough-to-categorize God Told Me To, Special Effects (1984) and his wildest two Michael Moriarty curios Q: The Winged Serpent and The Stuff (1985).

Of particular interest to budding moviemakers is a peak into Cohen’s creative process around the house, narrated by Cohen and his wife Cynthia Costa-Cohen. This stuff is gold. Cynthia marvels at just how prolific a writer her hubby is, even now, at age 77. He writes daily, she reveals, either with a flurry of sticky notes or in monologuing his thoughts to a tape recorder.

Come for the behind-the-scenes trivia, stay for the story of Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese pretending to be Jewish pallbearers for God Told Me To composer Bernard Herrman’s funeral. King Cohen is not to be missed!

]]>As traveling con man Larson E. Whipsnade, W.C. Fields battles with radio sensation Edgar Bergen and his acerbic wooden pal Charlie McCarthy in this jumbled but funny hodgepodge of vaudeville and circus gags which would forever redefine the Fields image, much to his dismay.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/cant-cheat-honest-man/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/cant-cheat-honest-man/Strange Victoryhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/OyObhsKxq-o/
https://trailersfromhell.com/strange-victory/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2018 19:06:46 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34361 ‘This Picture Kills Fascists’ might be a motto for this bombshell essay documentary. Leo Hurwitz’s film wasn’t made welcome in 1948 and would surely be controversial today, as it’s just too &%#$ truthful and blunt about good old American bigotry and injustice. The passionate, jarring plea for humanist sanity really shakes up viewers, in...

‘This Picture Kills Fascists’ might be a motto for this bombshell essay documentary. Leo Hurwitz’s film wasn’t made welcome in 1948 and would surely be controversial today, as it’s just too &%#$ truthful and blunt about good old American bigotry and injustice. The passionate, jarring plea for humanist sanity really shakes up viewers, in a constructive way. Hurwitz said that one TV executive compared it to The Sermon on the Mount. It’s still a lightning bolt against fascist ideas flourishing in the Land of the Free.

Strange Victory is the most important, invigorating film I’ve seen this year. Branded as communist propaganda in its brief non-release in 1948, the issues it brings up are still with us today, worse than ever. Filmmaker Leo Hurwitz forfeited his career over his beautifully written and constructed cry for American values. The new poster art gives the impression that it focuses on the problems of returning black veterans, when the film’s far wider purview addresses the dark evils of the country’s political soul. With its emotionally compelling images and music, Hurwitz’s message flies in the face of the consensus fairy tale that America lives up to its lofty ideals. It’s a ‘strange victory,’ when vile Nazi ideas so readily flourish.

The picture is packed with riveting montages and images heavy with meaning — and the cry for core human values applies strongly to today’s political miasma. At one point we see Nazi footage filmed in a concentration camp. Small children are being led down a barbed-wire path. I believe that they’ve just been separated from their parents, and are on their way to be gassed. It’s not just ancient history, it’s our story too.

Is this a documentary or propaganda? In 1948 the modern notion of documentary film hadn’t yet fully come together. The films of (usually) state-supported artists like Humphrey Jennings or Pare Lorentz were mostly screened in museums, alongside avant-garde and experimental pictures. Most nonfiction films were commissioned by companies to extol their industries in un-critical terms, and distributed non-theatrically. There was little in film that one would call investigative reporting. There were no exposés about the garment industry. A newsreel might show a deadly sweatshop fire, but a movie explaining the factual context would likely be an institutional picture about happy workers.

Documentary film artist Pare Lorentz of the Depression years won government contracts to make films that political detractors would decry as propaganda showcases for Roosevelt’s public works. On The Plow that Broke the Plains Lorentz hired several openly leftist cameramen-filmmakers from ‘The Worker’s Film and Photo League,’ which had braved police dogs to document strikes and protests. Paul Strand, Ralph Steiner and Leo Hurwitz criticized Lorentz’s softball approach to the causes of the Dust Bowl. The Plow preaches that the disaster was caused by poor farming practices, whereas the cameramen wanted the film to stress that predatory banking practices incentivized the farmers to abuse their land. The lesson from this is that no documentary is politically neutral. To a logging company aiming to secure public lands for business profit, a Public Service ad for Smokey the Bear is propaganda.

Just before war broke out, Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand made Native Land, a powerful advocacy film that uses cinema poetics to protest the collusion of companies and politicians in the crushing of the labor movement. It uses some of the Photo League’s footage from the decade before, particularly the powerful image of armed company goons threatening strikers. Much of the film, though, is a music-and-images poem celebrating the beauty of America. Between the dramatizations of anti-Union terror, the singer Paul Robeson provides both songs and narration.

Native Land was screened in just one theater in New York, and despite positive reviews disappeared almost immediately. With war newly declared America was in no mood for social criticism. But the FBI was taking names — the film’s cast includes future blacklistees Art Smith and Howard Da Silva. The subsequent State Department persecution of Paul Robeson went way beyond simple blacklisting.

Leo Hurwitz spent part of the war in New York helping launch the nascent TV industry, even before regular broadcasts began. But he felt creatively and politically cramped, and when the war ended took a break to make the privately-funded Strange Victory. In my experience it is the most important political advocacy film of the late 1940s. Milestone has released the newly restored hour-long picture with some terrific interview extras and other short films by Hurwitz and Co..

Far better organized than Native Land, Strange Victory is likewise built around a narration script that is lyrical and sensitive, yet also quite brutal. I’ve seen no better expression of the oft-described postwar mood of anxiety and dread: by all reports there was a ‘moral depression’ stemming from the realization that the post-victory world of peace and social justice just wasn’t happening. Was the promised better future just an illusion, or was it betrayed?

Hurwitz builds most of his case from newsreel footage, but his main cinematic ingredient is the human face. Ordinary New Yorkers read the distressing headlines at a Central Park newsstand. What was the war we just fought all about, when more conflict is in the news? More efficient than a Frank Capra wartime Why We Fight morale-propaganda picture, Victory makes heavy use of excellent war footage, allied and enemy, to demonstrate how the appalling human suffering inflicted by fascist principles.

Hurwitz and Saul Levitt’s compelling narration script then drills right into the marrow of American fascism, showing how blacks in particular are still oppressed, and that hatemongers are actively spreading vicious lies about Jews, Catholics and other minorities on a mass scale. One section of the film shows images of the German villains responsible for Hitler’s reign of terror. It then proclaims that American Nazis, white supremacists and even the Ku Klux Klan are stronger than ever. It backs up the claim with the names and faces of various popular bigots, fascists, and white supremacists: bigot politician Joe McWilliams, convicted seditionist William Dudley Pelley, America First Party founder Gerald L.K. Smith, anti-Semite George E. Deatherage; Democratic Congressman, racist and HUAC founder John Elliott Rankin, pro-Fascists Merwin K. Hart and Lawrence Dennis, and white nationalists Homer Loomis and Emory Burke. Use the links and look them up — it’s a gallery of rogues unlikely to be profiled on Fox News.

The show uses extreme war images in a way that a modern liberal news organization would consider too ‘loaded’ with ‘triggers.’ Not just the images from the death camps, but the Nazi cameramen’s dispassionate recordings of Russian women weeping over dead and mangled bodies. Images of bloody-faced, traumatized young Russian women are here, likely just freed from being beaten and raped.

In 1948 this disturbing war footage was only three years old, and not yet openly viewable. * Later films made use of some of these same images in an ugly, exploitative context. Putting literal ‘dead baby’ footage in any film essay usually throws down flags of critical protest — back in WWI, American films staged scenes of Huns killing children to generate anti-German hatred. But the hardball approach makes sense here. Strange Victory is directly about Nazi values persisting on American soil. Hurwitz and his producer were well aware that a goodly percentage of Americans hold the belief I’ve heard expressed more than once, from surprising sources:

“Hitler may have done some bad things, but he had some good ideas too, you know.”

What does it take to convince Americans that Social Justice is a real need and a worthy cause? How do people ignore the still images from American lynchings, with happy crowds watching the atrocious murders of black men? Was the title Strange Victory derived from the song title Strange Fruit? Strange Victory was made years before the Civil Rights movement got underway, before affirmative action, etc. Race equality in the Armed Forces would soon be achieved, but it didn’t come about because it was the right thing to do: it was politically convenient to maintain a peacetime army with blacks unable to find civilian employment.

Hurwitz’s other ‘loaded dice’ cinematic content is just as powerful: a visual focus on beautiful babies and their mothers in maternity wards, images that elicit an immediate positive emotional reaction. The narration offers the adorable babies advice about what some of them will face as they grow up — their futures will depend on

“the color of your skin… the slant of your eyes… the breadth of your nostrils… the shape of your nose.”

In a shockingly direct montage of babies being slapped at birth, the narration brands some of them with a social curse:

‘Nigger!’ ‘Kike!’ ‘Wop!’

It feels like we’re being slapped as well.

Only in the last act do we get to the image of the black aviator on the artwork poster. A staged scene at a postwar airstrip shows decommissioned cargo and bomber planes being refitted for commercial use. A black man (Virgil Richardson) applies for a pilot’s job but is turned down. We’ve just seen shots of him in an Army Air Corps cockpit; the actor was himself one of the now-lauded Tuskeegee Airmen. The narration says that a thousand blacks were allowed to fly as fighter pilots for America. Despite the postwar aviation boom, not one black pilot could find employment. Virgil walks away, realizing that he fought for an America that will allow him to work only in menial jobs. Another montage of staged scenes underlines the discrimination against blacks and Jews in employment. Recited statistics tell us how few black professionals are employed in America. If blacks live in slums it’s because decent, desirable housing is ‘restricted’: off limits to minorities and Jews.

Strange Victory’s rude jolt of truth came just before the HUAC ax fell on progressive politics in the arts. A number of Hollywood Social Issue pictures touched on the same ideas, but usually at a dramatic remove. George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame addresses American Fascism, yet presents it as a remote concept removed from everyday reality. The late Stanley Rubin’s screenplay for the noirish Violence is about a grassroots bigot rallying disgruntled veterans into a political movement. The prestige movies defending the civil rights of blacks and Jews — Gentleman’s Agreement,Crossfire, Home of the Brave — now seem conflicted, tamed by outside pressure to not be too extreme. Smaller movies with less-diluted reportage about ugly societal flaws were marginalized or suppressed depending on how effective were their arguments: Lost Boundaries (passing for black to secure a decent living), The Lawless (anti-Mexican-American bigotry). In the early 1950s, the pro-Union production Salt of the Earth was made under constant government attack.

The truth is that direct politics was never big box office material. Exhibitors didn’t like being picketed by the American Legion, or the death threats and vandal attacks that tended to happen only to left-wing political films. Strange Victory’s ideas weren’t really radical. The big Broadway musical South Pacific, which debuted in 1949, self-censored ‘dangerous’ speeches about racial equality because the ‘postwar American audience would have found such onstage sentiments to be offensive.’

In her interview in the book Tender Comrades, activist and future animator Faith Hubley talks about working as Leo Hurwitz’s assistant. She says that Strange Victory was made just before the HUAC onslaught against Hollywood began. In an interview preserved on Milestone’s disc, Leo Hurwitz explains that network executives that previously praised his work refused to have anything to do with him after seeing Strange Victory. Instead of returning to his promised TV directing job he was blacklisted, investigated, and even denied a passport. His next American credit would be in 1961, on another self-produced cinematic essay film. Hurwitz wasn’t issued another passport until he was chosen to supervise the videotaping of the Israeli Eichmann trial for Television.

The film’s five excellent narrators are the Broadway star Alfred Drake, actor Gary Merrill, Saul Levitt, Faith Elliott Hubley and singer and actress Muriel Smith. The ‘unknown’ Smith ought to be more famous, as we’ve all heard her voice: she does the uncredited singing for Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Jane Avril in Moulin Rouge, April Olrich’s Uruguayan entertainer in The Battle of the River Plate and Juanita Hall’s Bloody Mary in the film of South Pacific.

The beauty of Strange Victory is in Leo Hurwitz’s ease with the film medium — it communicates its ideas on waves of editorial harmony. The busy, dynamic David Diamond music score fits the show like a glove, building a strong emotional charge. Yes, the movie goes in for extremes — the images of babies are emotionally loaded, and some viewers shrink from scenes of real cruelty no matter what the context. But the context is a legitimate, forceful debate about the quality of our lives. The poetic text has gravity, a moral strength not heard in anybody’s modern political filmmaking. Most of the supposedly ‘best’ documentaries in this recent list are lightweight trifles compared to the relatively unknown Native Land and especially Strange Victory.

2018 is a year of political discord, with the notion of liberalism attacked from all sides. Strange Victory may sound like bad news but it is heartening — seventy years ago (!) this film proclaimed a positive, aggressive truth about America, and its maker paid a price for his patriotism. We need the same kind of forthright courage now.

The Milestone Cinematheque’s Blu-ray of Strange Victory has been ‘meticulously restored by Metropolis Post and Milestone from the original 35mm nitrate fine grain master.’ In HD the images look pristine. The sound is excellent — David Diamond’s music score tracks the film’s arguments beautifully.

Milestone’s extras will make us wonder why Strange Victory was overlooked in textbooks about documentary history back in film school. First up is an epilogue added in 1964. To connect the film to the Civil Rights movement, Hurwitz added a narration and audio montage update, incorporating quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King.

Then comes an excerpt from Ingela Romare’s 1992 video docu On Time, Art, Love, and Trees: A Meeting with Leo T. Hurwitz. It’s a rare opportunity for Hurwitz to tell his own story and he does so as if he were an old soldier back from the wars. A second interview with producer Barney Rosset, taped by a local TV station, allows the noted publisher to talk about his foray into film production. ‘If you film the truth, they will come’ has never been a workable marketing theory, and Rosset mostly explains the futility of getting Strange Victory any kind of wide audience. Rosset is much more famous as the owner of Grove Press. He’s the controversial activist that prevailed in Supreme Court cases fighting obscenity laws. His legal dealings with government offices and archives likely gave him the skills to access publicly owned enemy film footage.

The disc also gathers six MoMA films from Leo Hurwitz’s early years as a member of the ‘Worker’s Film and Photo League’ and ‘Nykino.’ The films mostly document protests and strikes. The quality is patchy; two of the films appear to have been assembled at a later date by Ralph Steiner, from scraps.

The final film Pie in the Sky is Ralph Steiner’s frequently- quoted silent comedy short from the Roosevelt WPA years, a satirical epic filmed in a garbage dump. Two bums (Elia Kazan and Russell Collins) miss out on their piece of charity pie at a Christian mission, and proceed to fantasize clumsy silent-movie satire against preachers promising rewards in heaven. Briefly-seen Molly Day Thatcher was Kazan’s first wife; another player is future director Irving Lerner (Murder by Contract, City of Fear). If not actually good, it’s certainly historic ‘lefty’ graffiti filmmaking, possibly inspired by a screening of a Luis Buñuel film or two.

*I had forgotten that key information about WW2 wasn’t public knowledge right after the war, and certain facts were held back for years. The 1948 Strange Victory narration track states that the truth of Hitler’s death in his bunker has not yet been made public. The subject appears to be classified — he’s merely presumed to be dead. I wasn’t aware of this.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Strange VictoryBlu-rayrates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Leo Hurwitz’s 1964 epilogue celebrating Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement; Leo Hurwitz speaking about Strange Victory to Ingela Romare from her 1992 film On Time, Art, Love, and Trees: A Meeting with Leo T. Hurwitz; Barney Rosset speaking about Strange Victory courtesy of CUNY TV City Cinematheque and interviewer Jerry Carlson; Six films from Hurwitz’s years as a member of the Worker’s Film and Photo League and Nykino, Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC: National Hunger March 1931, Bonus March 1932, Hunger March 1932, America Today, World in Review, Pie in the Sky.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? N0; Subtitles: None
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: July 16, 2018(5778vict)

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/strange-victory/feed/7https://trailersfromhell.com/strange-victory/I Walk Alonehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/9tqZxrkCn7Y/
https://trailersfromhell.com/i-walk-alone/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2018 19:03:01 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34358 One of a number of Paramount noirs seemingly forever MIA on disc, Hal Wallis’ show reunites Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott with promising newcomers Kirk Douglas and Wendell Corey. It’s light on action but strong on character — and it contains a key scene in the development of both the noir style and the...

One of a number of Paramount noirs seemingly forever MIA on disc, Hal Wallis’ show reunites Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott with promising newcomers Kirk Douglas and Wendell Corey. It’s light on action but strong on character — and it contains a key scene in the development of both the noir style and the gangster genre.

One reason we keep going to theatrical Noir festivals is that a substantial number of interesting classic-era features still haven’t surfaced on disc. Paramount has been slow with their digital noir rollout, perhaps because the noir heyday straddles the cut-off line of the sale of the Paramount library to MCA. The titles The Accused and Night Has a Thousand Eyes come to mind, but also 1947’s I Walk Alone, a show with big star power but a modest production. First-time director Byron Haskin had been filming special effects and directing second unit since the silent days, so was no stranger to a movie set. Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott were established as stars barely a year into their careers, while Kirk Douglas and Wendell Corey were ‘coming along nicely’ as Hal Wallis contractees. Lancaster, Scott and Corey had just been in Wallis’ Desert Fury. Until the late 1970s these films were in constant rotation in TV syndication, but they haven’t been seen in quite a while.

Ace screenwriter Charles Schnee simplifies the stage play source of I Walk Alone into a rather sideways critique of postwar American business realities. The center of the story is a six-minute discussion of the financial structure of a corporation that owns a night club! It’s 1947, and out of prison comes Frankie Madison (Burt Lancaster), a prohibition-era bootlegger who completed his full fourteen years in stir. Back in the day Frankie took the fall for his 50-50 partner Noll ‘Dink’ Turner (Kirk Douglas), who went on to found a popular nightclub. Now Frankie wants his promised fifty percent, and can tell that he’s being double-crossed from the start. Old buddy Dave (Wendell Corey) is now Dink’s bookkeeper-lackey. He seems completely defeated, and even turned down a percentage stake in the club so as not to come between Dink and money. Now a refined playboy wooing both society divorcee Alexis Richardson (Kristine Miller) and the club’s pianist-singer Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott), Dink has no intention of keeping Frankie as a partner. Frustrated by Dink and Dave’s explanation that, in the overlapping corporate ownership of the club, there’s nothing that can be ‘divided’ for him, Frankie turns to one of his old cronies in crime, Nick Palestro (Marc Lawrence) to straighten things out the old way: he’ll simply muscle in on the club and take over.

Thirties gangland meets the air-tight corporate corruption of film noir — Frankie Madison has been gone only fourteen years but he might as well be an artifact from the Middle Ages. He and Dink were once tough guys who hijacked trucks and ran from the law, but Dink now wears tailored shirts and luxuriates like a millionaire in his plush office, letting fussy French chefs and an equally suave manager (George Rigaud of They Came to Rob Las Vegas) run things. Dink has two women on his string. He gets set to wed the caustic heiress while callously using the sweet entertainer to pry secrets from his old partner Frankie. Of course Kay falls in love with Frankie.

The show has a gangland showdown and a shooting fatality, and leans heavy on romantic scenes, with Liz Scott’s Kay being open and supportive to our Rip Van Winkle ex-bootlegger. But it’s also a key noir of the time, a non-subversive critique of modern business. A couple of years later, Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil would insist that business America was as corrupt as a mob racket, that Capitalism is itself evil. I Walk Alone simply says that hoods that once stole liquor now sell it in fancy financial constructs that insure that they pay no taxes.

The key scene is still a stunner; in 1947 its revelations must have been news to the average wage earner that believes in American fair play. Wendell Corey’s demoralized accountant Dave, over Frankie’s frustrated protests, explains that although Dink runs everything and orders people about like a feudal prince, he owns nothing that can be shared with his old partner. Different corporations run different parts of the business; each has a board of directors that ensure nobody can figure out who owns what. Dink runs the show but has no personal accountability for anything. It’s a law-proof paper empire more profitable than any racket from the Capone days.

This is only Burt Lancaster’s fourth picture and maybe the first in which he keeps his shirt on through the whole movie. Burt was something of a sex symbol at the start and his first screen image was of a muscular guy in a sweaty undershirt. Even the avant-garde world picked up on this, when the 1948 experimental film The Uncomfortable Man added a homosexual spin to a story of a 42nd Street drifter, by having him hang out next to a giant theatrical standee of a sweaty Lancaster in Brute Force. Lancaster’s acting skills here are still a work in progress — in more than one scene Frankie Madison just stands with an unchanging dumb look on his face, while the other players emote around him. Lancaster’s other early directors may have protected him a little better: John Huston, Jules Dassin, Lewis Allen.

Some fans see Lizabeth Scott as a liability but I don’t think she ever let a film down. Her distinctive looks and voice are perfect for these stylized noir dramas. In Haskin’s Too Late for Tears she plays a perhaps too fatale of a femme to play, but she’s sensationally sensitive in André de Toth’s Pitfall just the next year. This part is just regulation girlfriend material. Her Kay gravitates from the slimeball Dink to the dumb but faithful hunk Frankie, while singing songs on the side. Producer Hal Wallis made certain to tag all commercial bases.

In his own fourth film Kirk Douglas shows his full colors as a two-faced creep — his Dink Turner has even more superficial slime charm than his Whit Sterling in Jacques Tourneur’s superlative Out of the Past. Dink bullies his French assistant and smooth-talks both of his girlfriends. He won’t deal with Frankie until he can be sure that he holds all the cards. A ‘Winner’ who ‘Believes in Strength,’ Dink is a thoroughly hissable villain, the kind of business cheat who appeals to a foe’s honesty, and then snickers as his victim leaves the room.

The unheralded star of I Walk Alone is the under-appreciated but excellent Wendell Corey, an actor applauded for his part in Rear Window but slighted for bringing insufficient heat to his Hal Wallis noirs, especially The File on Thelma Jordon. Corey’s defeated bookkeeper fully expresses the noir worldview — Dave has long ago made a compromise with corruption and contented himself with a safe, demeaning job cooking two sets of books for Dink Turner. Dave allows himself to be ordered about like a servant, and most of his exchanges with Frankie are pitiful admissions of impotence. His rebellion is the film’s turning point but also the biggest plot weakness — rather than just whistle-blowing the whole setup, Dave rather lamely announces his intentions to Dink, hanging a ‘shoot me’ sign on his own back.

The gorgeous, expressive Kristine Miller is as spoiled-unpleasant here as she is sweet and vulnerable in Haskin’s Too Late for Tears. It’s a great showcase role but Wallis apparently dumped Miller after a third noir appearance. Like so many noir hopefuls, she spent most of her career in TV yet will always be visible in her support role in From Here to Eternity.

Mike Mazurki was probably cast because he was the only decent actor who could credibly take out Burt Lancaster in a hammer lock. In the other character bits, Frankie’s abortive new ‘gang’ smartly evokes the earlier generation of gangster epics. Pock-marked Marc Lawrence looks anything but dependable, and sure enough, his hood retreats to his lousy used car business. The other three gang members are real losers, with the great Mickey Knox making a sharp impression as a thug eager to earn quick cash with his gun. This is of course the same Mickey Knox that, when blacklisted, restarted his career in Rome and worked with Sergio Leone. Learn from Mickey, kids, go to junior college and acquire a foreign language.

Paramount likely saw I Walk Alone as a no-risk inexpensive star vehicle. It’s fairly obscure now, whereas back in the early 1970s it was often quoted in genre studies of the gangster film. One couldn’t read an essay about the the generic roots of The Godfather without a politically- minded critic lauding Haskin’s show as a radical warning about corporate tyranny. The show is by no means radical, but its speech about tricky corporate accounting (for a lousy nightclub!) does plant a germ in the brain: something’s not right in this blessed land of high profits and No Sharing with Nobody, not Nohow.

The KL Studio ClassicsBlu-ray of I Walk Alone is a good encoding of this smooth Paramount star showcase from the year when Hollywood learned that the Golden Years were fading fast. There’s some dirt here and there, and a few sequences are a bit hazy, but overall Leo Tover’s regulation low-key noir lighting looks just fine.

Victor Young’s music score is quite good until the dramatic scenes, when it appears to try too hard — the hyped romance & jeopardy music is a bit strong for the mostly passive visuals. The ‘big’ music somehow makes some of the film seem small.

Troy Howarth injects humor into his audio commentary coverage; with all those stars and the busy Hal Wallis involved, it should have been a cinch to research juicy anecdotal tidbits on this show. In his autobio, even director Byron Haskin has a lot to say. Never the one to toot his own horn, Haskin notably opined that he was allowed to direct all those name actors because they were too inexperienced to realize that he’d never officially helmed a feature before.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/i-walk-alone/feed/5https://trailersfromhell.com/i-walk-alone/Ready Player Onehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/pji-ZhrZGNk/
https://trailersfromhell.com/ready-player-one/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2018 18:59:28 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34357 Lifelong gaming fan Steven Spielberg goes all-in for motion capture, with much different results than The Adventures of Tintin. It’s an ode to 1980s videogame fads and pop culture that could be re-titled ‘Astounding Adventures in Licensing.’ It’s Star Wars, TRON and Avatar mashed together for young teens, and more interesting than it ought...

Lifelong gaming fan Steven Spielberg goes all-in for motion capture, with much different results than The Adventures of Tintin. It’s an ode to 1980s videogame fads and pop culture that could be re-titled ‘Astounding Adventures in Licensing.’ It’s Star Wars, TRON and Avatar mashed together for young teens, and more interesting than it ought to be.

In early 1979 I was on the set of ‘1941’ the day Steven Spielberg told everybody he was having trouble finding an idea for a tie-in board game, and was open for anybody’s ideas. A few weeks later some people came in with a mockup of a proposed board game, that I think had an image of John Belushi. It was a dumb roll-the-dice thing where a tank, a plane, a sub and motorcycle game pieces raced across an artwork city to see who got to the P.O.P. pier first. Spielberg was not pleased and no board game appeared for 1941. A couple of years later I had to drop something off at the Amblin’ office on the Universal lot. That took only twenty seconds, but I did get a glimpse at Steven’s office, where he was talking to people while playing an arcade game set up in front of his desk. It had to be at least 1981, so I feel safe saying that, yes, Steven Spielberg was definitely part of the cultural wave reflected in Ernest Cline’s book.

Ready Player One is a fresh item for me, as I paid little attention to its publicity buildup and theatrical rollout. It’s a perfectly decent CGI picture in that the direction is smooth and the storytelling slickly efficient. Zak Penn and Ernest Cline’s script gets across concepts that will tax the imagination of some of its intended audience of precocious kids and adults indulging their arrested-development synapses. Approached as an action throwaway picture (the kind that cost $250 million to throw away) it’s a fun diversion with more to offer than Spielberg’s dinosaur park money machines. Even if only partly engaged, viewers will find RPO to be the pop fantasy equivalent of an epic packed with all-star cameos: instead of playing spot-the-actor, we try to spot scores of ’80s fantasy characters and icons.

It’s a picture about kids playing video games, that once-dire genre set largely inside video arcades. Big action movies now appear to exist inside elaborate virtual reality video game worlds, not just Marvel sagas but action films like the Bourne series — which operates in a stylized action world, not the one we live in. Ready Player One is very aware of this 21st century entertainment construct: because so many human consumers spend so much time in a virtual gaming space, it’s possible to pretend that video games are the real world.

Just like the multi-leveled realities proposed by sci-fi pioneers like World on a Wire, Ready Player One proposes that players can live on both real and virtual levels. The story plays out in a future America (2045) where most people are impoverished; our hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in a shanty town trailer park, where the trailers are stacked a dozen high. Wade prefers his time spent in a virtual reality zone called OASIS, where he exists as a far cooler avatar called Parzifal. There he meets and interacts with other players that know each other only by these secret identities. Wade seriously wants to win am all-important, world-changing virtual game. OASIS’s creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance) is dead, yet lives on in a virtual legacy he has recorded, as the wizard Anorak. Halliday is going to give OASIS away to whoever can solve three game puzzles and find the game’s Easter Egg, the toughest challenge of all. Various players ‘clan up’ for the challenge, but the expected winner is the IOI Corporation’s CEO Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who has hired massive teams of players and regularly buys the services of any player that shows promise. Parzifal finds himself bonding with several other egg hunters, especially the technically savvy Aech (Lena Waithe); he’s also dazzled by the sexy, spunky and competitive Art3mis (Olivia Cooke). The first challenge is a horrendously hairy car race game. Parzifal succeeds by going to a virtual James Halliday museum to look for clues in the hologram records of the genius’s life. A curator pokes fun at Parzifal, but also likes his analytic approach to the problem.

As soon as Parzifal solves the first puzzle his life changes. Everybody considers him a celebrity and even Art3mis sees an advantage in casually teaming with him. He joins an anti- IOI group and meets Art3mis’ real-world counterpart, Samantha. She’s self-conscious of her facial birthmark but the two do not disappoint each other. Sorrento doubles down with crass offers to put Parzifal on his team. When the kid continues to succeed in competition, Sorrento puts more effort into stopping him by underhanded means. That includes criminal activity back in the real world.

My frustratingly literal synopsis gives no indication of what Ready Player One is like to watch — it’s at least 80% hyper-intense action montage inside a computer game. Cut lightning-fast, the car race scene throws imagery at us faster than it can be absorbed. Most every shot has three things happening simultaneously, the information overload piles up at a rate only gamers could appreciate. Spielberg’s editors also complicate the mix by frequently cutting to parallel action outside OASIS — in a battle game, dozens of virtual combatants in the game are mirrored by their real-life originals performing the same virtual-reality motions in the real world. When a giant monster falls and crushes a hundred IOI players, their gaming stations shut down (‘game over’) and new players must be rushed in to take the place of those that are exhausted.

Let me get the film comparisons over first. There’s an obvious precedent in Tron, with its strong story similarities. Non-gamers will also be reminded of big pictures that borrow gaming notions. Avatar of course has a man who is projected into a different identity, leaving his real self vulnerable back in the real world, which is Parzival/Wade’s constant problem. Less obvious will be Videodrome, with its less benevolent guru for a human video evolution, who continues to direct his domain after his physical body is dead. The pop culture realm that Ready Player One celebrates is mostly benign nerd culture, the faith of the folk that still worships Star Trek and Star Wars and haunts comic book stores.

Wade’s ‘journey’ is straight from the Star Wars / Luke Skywalker mold, through and through. Our disadvantaged hero is also the future master of the universe. This George Lucas brainstorm tickled the imagination of lazy teens everywhere: YOU already have the magic quality that will make you a hero, even if you’re an ignorant underachiever who refuses to get an education, work, or otherwise better yourself. The parallel continues in that Wade loses his Aunt Beru to the Empire Alice to a raid by IOI. A bombing in the trailer stacks is a terror act straight from The Battle of Algiers.

And to knock off the last thematic observation, OASIS founder James Halliday is set up as a parallel to the masters of our present-day computer/internet/social media world. Like them, OASIS is a lifestyle power & profit goliath that dominates and directs modern life. The nerdy Halliday had two acolytes way back when, the benign Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg) and the venal Nolan Sorrento. The main storyline conflict is to see if Sorrento will conquer the virtual cosmos of OASIS and control our destiny forever. Putting ‘the fate of the world’ at stake isn’t enough anymore, our dream world is threatened as well. It’s a fully Totalitarian Leisure Lifestyle!

We older adults of course note that Wade and his pals, although penniless, have access to the expensive hardware needed for even minimal participation in OASIS. Grumbly types will see the same disconnect in reality, where kids that can’t afford tuition somehow can tote thousands of dollars of smartphone hardware and software subscriptions. It’s tough when modern teen life requires shelling out Mom’s hard-earned money for the right to choose from a narrow list of options owned and controlled by global companies. Welcome to reality, Glenn.

Back to Ready Player One. We’re thrust into a road race game and a giant battle game, plus at least a dozen action scenes that depict various IOI minions trying to neutralize Wade and his pals in the real world. These scenes will not be fully readable by viewers attuned to conventional visual storytelling — the pace will separate the kids from the parents.

The biggest aspect of Ready Player One is surely its use of hundreds of iconic, copyrighted characters, mostly from the 1980s but expanded to other extremes as well. Back in 1988 we were knocked out by Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which somehow managed to incorporate ‘intellectual property’ cartoon characters controlled by both Warners and Disney. The net is thrown much wider here. We’re told that at least one or two Star Wars references are tucked into the shot backgrounds, even though we don’t see any TIE fighters or Ewoks.

Each copyrighted and trademarked character must have involved some kind of licensing negotiation, even if the item was borrowed from something Spielberg personally produced. Listing them would be an exercise in futility — I’m sure I tapped into a bunch, but I suspect that many are comic book characters I wouldn’t recognize. The IMDB connections page for Ready Player One has a long list, surely not complete. Is that spinning blade weapon literally meant to be the same one from the ’80s fantasy Krull?

I would think that film fans will be impressed by the way parts of Kubrick’s The Shining have been incorporated into one of the games. The reference wasn’t in the book, and since that film was a Warners’ release, it feels more like product placement to me. Even in the Spielberg revisit of the Overlook Resort, it still looks like burgundy wine is cascading out of the Overlook’s elevator, not blood.

I believe I saw a Star Trek logo incorporated into something, but I could be mistaken. Gary Teetzel tells me that Spielberg didn’t want references from movies he directed, but some do show up from shows he produced. He also reports that giant (Mobile Suit) Gundam characters appear because Eiji Tsuburaya’s Ultraman was unavailable. I vote for a three-hour documentary to show the process by which Toho licensed MechaGodzilla, who is given a re-design for his digital appearance here. Or was the negotiation a two-minute phone call that ended with a verbal, ‘Whatever you want, Steve!’?

The show is capped by a couple of Hallmark Card mottos. “It’s not about winning, it’s about playing” is in our cynical age a canard that nobody really believes, I suspect. There’s also a ‘Daddy Spielberg’ admonition for kids to take two days off each week to live in the real world. Somehow sharing waking reality with such fantasies doesn’t even seem like living (said the guy who spent his life watching movies). I would have preferred a Hallmark motto that motivates the legions of disconnected virtual zombies to go out and vote.

The acting is reasonable, and all of Spielberg’s actors hit the right notes in undemanding roles. Wade’s clan includes an 11-year-old pseudo-Samurai and an elderly guru, tapping all age groups. I recognize Olivia Cooke from her fine performance in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. They give her an easy-to-take facial birthmark, which comes off as a hipster fashion mark, not something to be self-conscious about. Samantha’s rebel teammate wears a tattoo that forms a similar pattern on his face — did I miss an explanation for that?

Director Spielberg must have had a good time with this show once he got beyond the headache-inducing months of figuring out the script and charting exactly what happens in such fine detail — there’s nothing sloppy about any of what must be thousands of demanding CGI shots. Once the digital work was being produced, did he just tell the effects supervisors, ‘make it incredibly cool and I’ll tell you if I like it?’ Can a hardworking CGI designer/manager/animator go to a particular frame, point out a detail and say “I did that!” The legions of talented artists that make these CGI movies seem very much like the expendable rent-a-gamers laboring by the hundreds for IOI’s Nolan Sorrento. To a better end, of course.

The Warner Brothers Home VideoUltra-HD + Blu-ray + Digital of Ready Player One is yet another powerful home video product in a small package. The UltraHD image yields up a phenomenal amount of detail, color nuance and contrast range, so much so that I think it rivals the projection quality at the average multiplex. The Blu-ray plays exceedingly well, too. These are miracle products, that aren’t going to look as good in any other medium — even streaming and downloading must have compromises for bandwidth. That said, the digital streaming version won’t disappoint viewers either.

A 3-D Blu-ray release exists, but Warners doesn’t offer them as review screeners.

Warners’ extras are a string of expensive featurettes examining the film from numerous angles. Completing the crossover between game and Blu-ray, the disc menus and content are said to carry Easter Eggs as well, for more extras.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/ready-player-one/feed/2https://trailersfromhell.com/ready-player-one/Never Give a Sucker an Even Breakhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/0qltuaAitgg/
https://trailersfromhell.com/never-give-a-sucker-an-even-break/#commentsMon, 16 Jul 2018 04:00:28 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34340W.C. Fields’ last starring vehicle was shot under the title The Great Man, and despite a host of studio-mandated cuts, stands as a triumphantly nonsensical, semi-autobiographical farrago of unreconstructed Fieldsiana. Sadly, few original Fields trailers exist so this one is a fan-made attempt to duplicate the style of Universal promotion circa 1941.

]]>W.C. Fields’ last starring vehicle was shot under the title The Great Man, and despite a host of studio-mandated cuts, stands as a triumphantly nonsensical, semi-autobiographical farrago of unreconstructed Fieldsiana. Sadly, few original Fields trailers exist so this one is a fan-made attempt to duplicate the style of Universal promotion circa 1941.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/never-give-a-sucker-an-even-break/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/never-give-a-sucker-an-even-break/THE BEST OF 2018 SO FARhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/zmunrM3EhXs/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-best-of-2018-so-far/#commentsSun, 15 Jul 2018 22:39:28 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34328Here it is, the second week of July already, and I feel as though I’ve barely seen anything in the realm of theatrical movies. Compared to the average movie critic anyway, who probably sees three or four (new) movies a week, to say nothing of the ones she/he sees at home. But my movie consumption...

]]>Here it is, the second week of July already, and I feel as though I’ve barely seen anything in the realm of theatrical movies. Compared to the average movie critic anyway, who probably sees three or four (new) movies a week, to say nothing of the ones she/he sees at home. But my movie consumption rate is still probably more ravenous than the average bear, and so at the risk of exposing just how limited my perspective is, I present to you my best of 2018 at the midpoint, ten movies (six of which are already available for home viewing) I think you should catch up with. The first three are particularly good (which is why they get a little more space, I suppose), and at first glance they might seem like strange bedfellows. But each one suggests a different mode of looking at life—quiet, measured, open to unexpected responses—or at the very least, in a world subsumed by superheroes and other forms of sensational overload, a different way of looking at movies, to say nothing of a different kind of movie to look at.

The others on the list are merely terrific. Certainly, it was a pleasure to have seen enough really good movies by July that, in order to keep myself to the traditional ten I had to leave an accomplished thriller like Hereditary or a heartfelt comedy drama like Love, Simon off my list. (I fully expect raised hackles over excluding at least Hereditary in favor of the last two lustrous pearls on my list.) But the less said about the year’s most serious bummers, including Ava Du Vernay’s A Wrinkle In Time, Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline and (sorry, fanboys) the Russo brothers’ Avengers: Infinity War, the better. On to the good stuff.

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Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is, I think, truly a movie for our moment. It’s an exquisitely tormented consideration of faith (and the lack thereof), the difficult possibility of transcendence, and the seemingly even more difficult act of holding ostensibly opposed impulses of hope and despair in balance without completely losing one’s shit. And it speaks to the faithful in terms of what even the faithless see directly in front of them. Ethan Hawke is exceptional as the tortured pastor counseling the husband of a parishioner despondent over the dire implications of climate change, and the transference of that burden of responsibility from counseled to counsellor addresses one of the pastor’s central spiritual crises, a profound insecurity over whether can God forgive us for what we’ve done. The movie is a brilliantly sustained act of tension between the spiritual and the corporeal (and the influence of each on the other), building toward an act of desperate release, of a man trying to make a mark on the world, on his own soul. Hawke’s pastor, exiled in his doubt and overseeing a historically significant house of worship made into a sparsely attended tourist trap under the stewardship of a corporate-style megachurch, truly is God’s lonely man. Over all of Schrader’s most personal work, including Taxi Driver, with which this movie shares some stylistic devices derived from transcendental filmmakers like Robert Bresson, as well as its suffocating sense of isolation, this film feels the most piercing, the one that hurts the most, the one that offers the possibility of mortification and the bearable weight of an earthly yoke in equal measure as penance for divine deliverance. It’s the best movie I’ve seen so far in 2018.

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It’s possible that society, especially American society, might have continued to undervalue the contribution of Fred Rogers to civil discourse and the general well-being. But Morgan Neville’s fascinating, unexpectedly (even overwhelmingly) emotional documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? seems poised to become the best of all possible insurances against the man’s ever evaporating from our collective neighborhood. Prior experience with the PBS program which, from 1968 to 2001 provided an oasis for children from the crass relentlessness of most Saturday-morning kid-oriented fare, isn’t required to appreciate this rich overview of Fred Rogers’ achievements as the overseer of a singular corner of television influence. But one’s own memories of spending time in the Neighborhood is likely to make the tears come faster and with more force. And those unfamiliar with Rogers’ work as anything but a Saturday Night Live joke may find themselves surprised by the level to which this articulate advocate for the spirit of childhood (Rogers was an ordained minister whose specific religious views never overtly became part of the program’s content) used his genteel pulpit to help children of the ‘60s and ‘70s deal with some harsh realities, like racism, childhood disease and even political assassination.Neville’s great achievement, apart from crafting a wonderful, surely enduring film, is to secure Rogers’ reputation as not only a children’s champion in guiding young ones through the process of discovering the world, but one for showing those kids who became adults a way of living in it once their own discoveries had been made.

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Probably the most denigrating thing I can think of say about Debra Granik’s intense, affecting familial drama Leave No Trace is that it sports a somewhat generic title which evaporates almost immediately upon contact with the eyes and ears. Not so the movie itself, however. The story involves a PTSD-inflicted war veteran Will (Ben Foster) who has taken himself and his daughter Tom (newcomer Thomasin Harcourt Mackenzie) off the grid, making for them a quiet, if illegal, existence living off the land in a forested park within Portland, Oregon city limits. Once they’re reined in by social service agents and given a taste of being reintegrated back into society, the father bristles, but the daughter realizes that, though she wants nothing more than to be with her dad, a modest life among modest people is pretty appealing too. What’s genuinely marvelous about Granik’s approach, especially with Mackenzie, is the way director and actress make clear the dawning difference between parent and child without pressing home the metaphoric significance. Mackenzie’s Tom eases into a world of new experiences with a child’s natural curiosity—sea horses she reads about in books, flag dancers at a local church, 4-H kids raising rabbits, learning about the temperament and tendencies of hive bees—while her dad remains at a measured distance, his mind never far away from the clarion call of an isolated existence to which he longs to return. By the time Tom declares to Will that “the same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me,” the movie has fulfilled its unhurried journey toward sublimity, with myriad opportunities for its audience to appreciate the nuanced, rarified air of a soul discovering itself, asserting independence, breathing in the world.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-best-of-2018-so-far/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/the-best-of-2018-so-far/Irma La Doucehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/AFSikthSwhs/
https://trailersfromhell.com/irma-la-douce/#commentsSat, 14 Jul 2018 16:56:30 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34324 Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s lavish movie boils down to a dirty party joke, but they struck gold just the same. Audiences flocked to see Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine reunited in a fantasy Parisian red light district, in a show that looks like Disneyland for fans of Playboy cartoons. Irma La Douce Blu-ray...

Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s lavish movie boils down to a dirty party joke, but they struck gold just the same. Audiences flocked to see Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine reunited in a fantasy Parisian red light district, in a show that looks like Disneyland for fans of Playboy cartoons.

Although there’s no such thing as a bad Billy Wilder movie, it isn’t as if they’re all created equal. As it turns out, his biggest box office success comes up a bit short in the charm department, with its sometimes-thin jokes sagging under the weight of an ultra-long running time. Still, there’s a great deal to admire in the production, especially André Previn’s adapted music score.

Irma La Douce means well, and much of it certainly brings a smile to one’s lips, but it’s one of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s least successful films. Its physical design is remarkable and its color dazzling, but this time around the ‘dirty Wilder fairy tale’ outwits itself. Repressed by the Production Code, Americans of 1963 were curious about the unrestrained adult content in all of those foreign art films they weren’t allowed to see. The real impetus for Wilder’s picture was likely Jules Dassin’s Never On Sunday, a French-Greek production that received a U.S. release even though its subject is a Piraeus prostitute who loves her work.

Irma is actually fairly daring — the glowing Joseph LaShelle images, in Panavision and Technicolor, even flirt with partial nudity. Wilder and Diamond don’t do anything wrong, exactly, but after our initial surprise the story weaknesses begin to show. Jack Lemmon’s character becomes too cartoonish to maintain our sympathy, or for the sentimental conclusion to take hold. Perhaps these shortcomings are noticeable only because this is a Billy Wilder picture — it’s still far above average.

And So I Left the Police Department / And Got Myself a Steady Job

Wilder wrings every joke possible from pop illusions about prostitution, the comic myth of a carnal candy store for adults. The naíve, sweet gendarme Nestor Patou (Jack Lemmon) is transferred to a notorious Rue Casanova, a narrow lane frequented by streetwalkers. He’s so green that he actually pays for the apple he takes from a street vendor. Shocked to discover that gambling is going on here flesh is being peddled on the sidewalk, Nestor calls in a raid. That disturbs the existing arrangement between the pimps and the cops, especially when his dragnet brings in his own chief along with the girls. Now jobless and back in the Rue Casanova he’s befriended by bartender-racounteur Moustache (Lou Jacobi) and adopted by the #1 hooker Irma La Douce (Shirley MacLaine). To keep Irma, Nestor must defeat Hippolyte the Ox (Bruce Yarnell), her mec,or pimp. But he refuses to become a pimp himself because he can’t bear for Irma to sleep with anyone else. To that end Nestor disguises himself as an English twit named ‘Lord X,’ who monopolizes Irma and pays her a fortune just to play cards. But this puts Nestor in a catch-22: he must work like a slave in the street market to earn the money to pay Irma so she can keep him. Worse, his long absences convince Irma that he’s seeing one of the other girls – perhaps Kiki the Cossack (Star Trek’s Grace Lee Whitney) or Lolita (Hope Holiday).

Liz Taylor and Richard Burton aside, Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine are the star pairing of the year 1963. They don’t achieve the sure-thing chemistry that graced their superlative The Apartment three seasons before, mainly because Wilder pitches their characters at the level of a Little Annie Fannie comic strip. Nestor and Irma are efficient at swapping dirty double entendres about sex in between slapstick encounters, but they’re in some way unsatisfactory. They never even kiss on screen, and we never warm up to them. Of course, Wilder is a master at slipping in surprisingly vulgar jokes. When chastized by Nestor, Irma doesn’t realize his complaint refers not to her, but to her dog: “There are rules you know! You need to put it on a leash!”

Wilder is obviously taken with his notion of a Red Light district that operates as a sentimental sidewalk bazaar for carnal sin. The girls have outrageous names like Amazon Annie and Suzette Wong. They’re perfectly happy in their work, sauntering along the crooked rue hawking their wares. Their mecs are organized in a slyly-named association that carries the acronym M.P.A.A.. The much praised interior-exterior Rue Casanova street sets designed by Alexandre Trauner make everything look warm and rosy, and the supporting chorus of comediennes come wrapped in costumes straight from the color cartoons in Playboy.

Irma La Douce had recently been a successful Broadway musical but Wilder dropped the songs and went back to the original play. Nestor begins as a pure-minded medal winner for rescuing a kid in a playground and his rather depressing fall from grace is depicted with a flippant ‘way of all flesh’ attitude. Neither Nestor’s suffering nor the attractive French fantasy world he and Irma live is all that pleasant, even with slapstick gags and funny fights breaking out nightly in Moustache’s cafe. Nestor’s defeating Hippolyte in a fight doesn’t work, as we never believe Jack Lemmon would fight anybody (especially not after Fire Down Below). The biggest fun-killer is Nestor’s ‘Lord X’ persona, which simply doesn’t play very well. Wilder tries to make ‘X’ a composite of every English movie cliché going. The English Twit jokes lack wit and Lemmon’s fake teeth and eyepatch are terminally unfunny. Lord X is just not in the same league as Lemmon’s superlative Daphne in Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.

This time around, Wilder’s Perfect Comedy Mousetrap is more frustrating than funny. Irma loves Nestor and is willing to sleep with other men in order to stay with him. Nestor can’t abide this so goes in disguise and pays her big sums not to sleep with anyone else. But he has to secretly work so hard to earn this money that she decides he’s cheating on her and stops loving him. The crazy situations in other Wilder stories usually make a clear statement about human romance, but the only lesson here is a smarmy ‘ya just can’t win with females.’ Wilder’s next picture Kiss Me, Stupid is technically far sleazier yet its farcical framework of mistaken identity and deception boils down to an ironic endorsement of good values, and an interesting examination of the convention of marriage. The comic framework of Irma La Douce doesn’t even support its old-fashioned sex jokes, as it lumbers on for two hours and 23 minutes. We’ve really bailed much earlier, when Nestor defeats Irma’s pimp and takes her for his own.

The main mystery about Irma La Douce is why the real M.P.P.A. didn’t pounce on it like a sardine at a cat show. Yes, the Code office gave comedies wider latitude than dramas. But the movie breaks multiple rules while flaunting its dirty jokes without a shred of enlightenment. One would have to think the grand cathedral wedding with the bride lurching about from labor pains would also have dropped a flag over at the Catholic Legion of Decency. Maybe they were all too flattered by the same year’s The Cardinal, and Wilder’s film slipped by.

The more serious critics called Wilder’s sex romp a stinker, the capper show from a cynical master of bad taste. I remember reading a notice from one reviewer who couldn’t get past the sight of the bored-looking Shirley MacLaine showing off her bright green underwear for Nestor. 1963 audiences must have wanted to see what the fuss was about, as Irma La Douce became Wilder’s biggest moneymaker of the 1960s.

It’s said that Elizabeth Taylor was courted to play Irma, but we find it hard to imagine anybody listening to jokes if Liz were wearing Irma’s racy green underwear. A more established rumor is that Charles Laughton was originally set to play the loquacious bartender Moustache, until sickness forced him to bow out. Wilder bios relate the story of the director visiting the actor to read the script and laugh together, when both men knew Laughton was sinking fast.

The large supporting cast provides some dividend pleasures, especially the inhabitants of Wilder’s Rue Casanova. Along with the aforementioned Grace Lee Whitney, Joan Shawlee and the hilarious Hope Holiday return from The Apartment to play exaggerated hookers. The cult vixen Tura Satana of Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! is the sultry Suzette Wong. Very visible as customers are TV star Bill Bixby, and a very young James Caan. Cliff Osmond and Howard McNear, both of Kiss, Me Stupid, are here as well. Wilder’s larger scenes with dozens of actors dancing and fighting in the Cafe Moustache, are beautifully staged.

The KL Studio ClassicsBlu-ray of Irma La Douce Looks and sounds great, making the old (2003) MGM DVD instantly obsolete. The sharp transfer gives us our first good look at the film’s beautiful art direction and cinematography — it’s a pleasure to spend time on the Rue Casanova, even as a spectator. We also note André Previn’s award-winning music, which adds a vein of sweetness that the film needs. We’re told that some of the unused songs from the musical version were utilized as underscore.

Kino lavishes two full commentaries on Irma, both of which are fun listens. The venerable Joseph McBride tackles the first track with a lengthy unbroken conversational lecture. Covered thoroughly are the film’s production, Billy Wilder’s career and McBride’s own experiences of being a Catholic boy who snuck out three times to see a film that his church congregation had sworn to boycott. McBride’s new book How Did Lubitsch Do It? acknowledges Billy Wilder’s status as an acolyte of the great director, but he doesn’t draw as many comparisons as I thought he would — the garbageman that opens this movie seems an ode to Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise. McBride also reads at length from one of his own interviews with Billy Wilder.

Kat Ellinger’s track goes off in other informative directions, telling some of the same Wilder stories but pulling in different associations from pop cinema. The presence of Tura Satana, for instance, instantly gets us a précis of one of the stripper-actress’s Russ Meyer epics. Ms. Ellinger is the Editor-in-Chief at Diabolique Magazine.

The film’s playful part-animated original trailer is included as well, narrated by Paul Frees. It looks as though it were animated for flat-widescreen, and then adapted to ‘scope proportions. The trailers and publicity for all of the post- Some Like It Hot films trumpet Wilder as a director-star in his own right, pitching the films to an urbane, movie-wise audience,

The only reason I can think of to retain the old DVD is the fact that it carries alternate French and Spanish dub tracks.

Forget the ‘famous book’ doldrums — this exciting seagoing drama will take your head off. Criminally unseen and unheralded, Allied Artists’ classic is an impressive feat by director-co-screenwriter and star Peter Ustinov. It introduced Terence Stamp and provided Robert Ryan with a deserved career highlight.

Talk about a book that works like gangbusters… When Warners’ first DVD came out in 2007 I found out that two of my children had read Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Foretopman in high school. Their discussion impressed me. My oldest son explained that the Peter Ustinov version stresses some aspects of the story’s moral dilemma, but not others. The film is a superb, almost mysterious examination of the duties and obligations of men at war — to their country, their officers, to each other and to themselves. Seeing it as a simple conflict between good and evil between the Terence Stamp and Robert Ryan characters doesn’t do the story justice. The heavily symbolic book is given an insightful and subtle interpretation by the versatile Peter Ustinov, with an assist from writer DeWitt Bodeen. It’s easily the best Melville committed to film.

It’s 1797 in the Queen’s navy. The illiterate and inarticulate Billy Budd (Terence Stamp) is impressed from a merchant vessel to join the crew of the frigate Avenger fighting the French. Captain Edwin Fairfax Vere (Peter Ustinov) runs a tight ship, knowing that only by discipline can he keep his unhappy crew from rebelling: the ship’s contingent of armed Marines are necessary to prevent a mutiny. A hearty friend to all, Billy wins over even the most belligerent of his mates with his good spirits and fair attitude. But he soon runs afoul of John Claggart, the sadistic Master d’Arms (Robert Ryan). Claggart sees the need to verbally test Billy with suspicious remarks that the young man doesn’t really understand. He takes Billy’s smiles and weak answers as proof of disrespect and insubordination. Claggart becomes enraged at the idea of a sailor who doesn’t fear him, and resolves to use his authority against the innocent young man.

The moral dilemma conjured by Herman Melville for Billy Budd is both universal and timeless. In the brutal and extreme situation of men at war, authority and discipline can exact a terrible toll on the individual sailor, so much so that one’s own officers can seem more of an enemy than the foreigners on the opposing ships. Billy Budd sets up a recipe for disaster. Resentment and harsh discipline on the man o’ war are a given state of affairs, and the open-faced Billy upsets that balance with his simple goodness. Among the officers only the reasonable Captain Vere seems to appreciate Billy. Vere can envision a navy where the sailors serve because they believe in the mission and trust their officers, and not because they are threatened and whipped.

As with movies as diverse as The Flight of the Phoenix and The Wild Bunch, the story of Billy Budd is an exacting exercise in the way men relate to each other under harsh conditions. The sailors below decks are a cross section of strength and weakness. Billy makes friends with all of them, even though he first must fight the hotheaded Enoch Jenkins (Ronald Lewis of Mr. Sardonicus). The old sail maker Dansker (Melvyn Douglas, Hud & The Americanization of Emily) and others accept Billy for exactly what he is, uncomplicated and honest.

Above decks it’s a different matter. The junior officers (Paul Rogers, John Neville, David McCallum) stay neutral so as not to be accused of favoritism, but the malevolent Claggart firmly believes that no ship can run properly unless the crew is properly terrorized. Claggart enjoys the whippings on deck. He hides his cruel tricks from the captain and employs secret snitches like Squeak (Lee Montague) to impose his reign of terror. Billy believes in the fairness of his superiors and takes Captain Vere’s morale speeches literally. He bears no malice but also fears no man. He normally responds to authority with an honest smile and his own attempt at a chipper reply. But Billy faces an unreasonable foe in the murderously insecure Claggart, who assumes that any crew member not cowering before him, is showing disrespect. When faced with a hostile situation, Billy sometimes cannot get his words out. When he stammers, Claggart decides that the boy is mocking him.

High school literature teachers analyze Billy Budd by deciding that Billy is The Christ, Claggart is Satan and Captain Vere an unhappy Pontius Pilate. But the problems in Billy Budd will be familiar to any person caught in a political bind — at work, in school, in any organization — where it seems that good intentions are defeated by the malicious application of the power of rank. After a shocking 3rd Act incident Captain Vere is put into an impossible position of condemning a man he knows to be essentially innocent. Protocol and the rules of the sea demand one thing and justice and decency demand another. Vere is supposed to do what’s good for the whole boat, not just one foretopman. Will dispensing mercy show weakness, and lessen the fighting ability of his crew? Will he be showing favoritism?

Billy Budd comes to a shattering moral climax unseen in most movies of this kind. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory faces a similar issue with nothing like the finesse and subtlety shown here — Glory chooses a situation where our only rational conclusion is to brand the officer class as murderers and swine. Captain Vere and his command are much more complex, and nobody is simply a villain. Even the black-hearted sadist Claggart is a product of the system, just as is Billy.

Billy Budd is a realistic adventure story with plenty of exciting incident. Ustinov filmed it aboard a real sailing vessel at sea, and the film looks it; we wonder if they suffered some of the practical problems recounted by Steven Spielberg in Jaws. Terence Stamp’s debut picture shows only one aspect of the actor’s talent, but he’s a perfect Billy … one never forgets his joyful cry, “God Bless Captain Vere!” In the context of the scene, Billy’s shout cuts like a knife. Ustinov’s masterful direction of actors can be criticized only when it comes to his own character. Conceived to serve as an audience surrogate, Captain Vere never settles on any particular mindset. He isn’t quite so vulnerable in the book. Perhaps that’s really evidence of directorial wisdom, and not a weakness.

Robert Ryan is incredibly good as the monstrous Claggart. Saddled with a career playing uninteresting soldiers and western bad guys, the really desirable Robert Ryan roles stand out like gems: The Set-Up, On Dangerous Ground, Men in War. John Claggart has uncommon depth; we watch his face for subtle changes of mood. When Ryan’s eyes start to go glassy we know trouble is on the way. Claggart teaches an important lesson about not just the armed forces, but any organization that gives chosen men absolute power over others. When the wrong man achieves a position of authority, even a small office setup can encourage serious sociopathic behavior.

The Warner Archive CollectionBlu-ray of Billy Budd is a sterling presentation. Released through Allied Artists, the international production looks far different than a typical studio-made movie of its year. Although MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty has shipboard scenes just as authentic and ‘open air,’ it was made for many times the cost of Ustinov’s picture. Using the improved 2nd-generation CinemaScope lens system, the B&W image is clean and sharp, giving us a good look at all the early-’60s acting talent. If you want to get the attention of someone under fifty, point out Ducky from N.C.I.S. and The Baron from Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. They may think you’re trying to kid them.

A trailer is included. An added plus is a commentary in which the excellent film-talker Steven Soderbergh interviews Terence Stamp regarding his entire experience back in 1961. We hear good stories about several of the other actors as well Stamp’s reaction to landing such a showcase role for his first film … instant stardom resulted. The actor is both articulate and likeable. Soderbergh directed Stamp back in 2001, in the superior crime thriller The Limey.

Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man debuted in 1956, published by Gold Medal Books in an economical paperback edition with electrifying cover art by Mitchell Hooks.

Disguised as a modest science-fiction potboiler, Matheson’s brainy thriller appeared the same year Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit arrived at New York’s Roxy and Howl was unleashed via City Lights in San Francisco. Existential angst was all the rage and TheShrinking Man was its poster boy.

The first hand account of Scott Carey, a well-heeled suburbanite who suddenly finds himself growing smaller and smaller, Matheson’s briskly paced novella charts Carey’s literal and figurative descent as the tokens of his success – home, family and even house cat – literally rise up against him.

Keeping one eye on the cash register, Matheson drummed up a series of sensationalistic set pieces including cliffhanging skirmishes with savage felines and predatory spiders to offset the book’s metaphysical sentiments and Kinsey-esque digressions (Carey, tiny but still tumescent, spends one long hot summer lusting after the babysitter.)

The truck-sized spiders and whiff of forbidden sex were catnip to movie producers who leaned on exploitation fare – Albert Zugsmith, the man behind The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, convinced Universal to fork over $750,000 for the production (nearly double the budget of that same year’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and hired Jack Arnold to direct (while adding a marquee-friendly “incredible” to the title).

Matheson was enlisted for the screenplay and rejiggered his own time-shifting storyline into a linear narrative – turning Carey’s journey from tall, dark and handsome to atom-sized everyman into that rare thing, an acutely observed melodrama and heart-stopping suspense film. As Wages of Fear transformed a banal truck delivery into a slow-boil death march, Shrinking Man proved that a trip to the laundry room could be fatal.

At first glance, the hero of The Incredible Shrinking Man doesn’t seem so incredible – lounging at sea with his dishy wife Lou, he’s no more than a generic male model sprung from the Spiegel Catalog’s swimwear section. When his helpmate goes beneath to scare up more beer, a dense cloud rises over the horizon and surrounds the unwary vacationer – the mist passes by but leaves his skin with a preternatural glow. Days later he begins to dwindle.

“Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” and before long Scott and Lou are watching each other through the wrong end of the telescope. No longer the “little woman” Lou plays the concerned mother to Scott’s petulant half-pint – compelled to dress like a child he decides to act like one, moping in a oversized armchair like an unattended ventriloquist’s doll.

The restless Carey resigns himself to haunting bars and diners, a fugitive suitable for an Edward Hopper street scene. He finds some consolation in a brief friendship with a cheerful circus performer (April Kent), a compact beauty who only comes up to his chin. Until she doesn’t.

Now five inches tall and still southward bound, Carey takes up residence in a split-level doll house where an angry house cat chases him down the cellar and into the darkness.

Convinced of the worst, Lou prepares to surrender her home while just twenty feet below the kitchen her husband roams the basement garbed in a burlap tunic and makeshift sword – a mythological hero with an all-American dilemma – Orpheus is trapped in the underworld while Eurydice is upstairs packing the Buick.

Carey’s subterranean nightmare, taking up over 40 minutes of an 80 minute film, is his final test – all that remains is a harrowing battle with a hungry tarantula, the manifestation of all his tormentors rolled into one.

Carey slays the monster but celebration is not on his mind – finally tiny enough to crawl through the the mesh of a window screen, Carey ponders the stars and sees his future, experiencing an an out-of-body revelation not unlike the transcendental finale of 2001 – though Scott isn’t reborn ala David Bowman, hope has replaced horror and he comforts himself (and the audience) with thoughts of celestial immortality, a Saturday Matinee sermon for the Eisenhower era.

Clifford Stine was responsible for the wizardly effects cinematography and the prop crew was headed by Floyd Farrington and Ed Keyes. Collectively they transformed Scott’s world into a parade of brilliantly sculptured monoliths – from scissors to matchboxes to mousetraps – that suggest Claes Oldenburg at his most playful and ominous.

Aside from his atmospheric work on TV’s Peter Gunn, this is probably cinematographer Ellis W. Carter’s finest hour – the bland creature comforts of the Carey living room giving way to a shadowy cellar world is a tribute to Carter’s skill and the rock-steady craftsmanship of the Universal Studio system.

There are still no stateside Blu rays to be had of Arnold’s “mini” classic though Koch Media has released an HD version in Germany and Arrow Video recently weighed in with this 2017 Region 2 release in the UK.

Unfortunately the Arrow transfer is all over the map, soft and grainy in some scenes and inexplicably sharp in the effects-driven sections (which usually look awful in ’50s movies, contending with rear projection and film processes ala the Ray Harryhausen animation fests on home video).

The disc comes with a good selection of supplements but it would have been nice to see a behind-the-scenes photo gallery of the cast and crew horsing around with the oversized props – after the shrinking man’s tribulations, it’s a genuine picker-upper to see the actors having so much fun.

The extras include a fact-filled and occasionally autobiographical commentary from Tim Lucas, a documentary on Arnold’s career featuring forever young Bob Burns and the late Bill Warren along with two trailers, each narrated by Orson Welles (presumably quid pro quo for Zugsmith’s role in Touch of Evil, though Welles most likely appreciated Arnold’s looming camera angles.)

Also included is a “home movie” edit from Castle Films, the Reader’s Digest for movie fans, which makes a grim story even grimmer, ending the film at the moment Scott is whirling down a drain while Lou makes her departure – the abrupt end title is the final nail in Carey’s Super 8 coffin.

The official rundown via Arrow Video:

Brand new audio commentary by Tim LucasAuteur on the Campus: Jack Arnold at Universal – an extended documentary about the early career of director Jack Arnold at Universal-International studiosThere Is No Zero: Writing The Shrinking Man – an in-depth conversation with author Richard Christian Matheson about his father and the creation of the original Shrinking Man novel
Original Super 8 Home Cinema Version
Original Theatrical Trailer
Teaser Trailer
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck

And last, and far from least, is Glenn Erickson’s review of the German Blu ray.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/the-incredible-shrinking-man/feed/4https://trailersfromhell.com/the-incredible-shrinking-man/Get to Know Your Rabbithttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/u1ZfQLN7DAs/
https://trailersfromhell.com/get-know-rabbitt/#commentsFri, 13 Jul 2018 04:00:12 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=9631One of Brian dePalma’s more obscure credits, this unappreciated attempt to turn Tommy Smothers into a movie star fizzled out. Filmed in 1970 after Hi Mom and before Sisters, it fell victim to a regime change at Warner Bros. and wasn’t released until 1972. But it’s still an offbeat anti-establishment spoof that’s now finally available...

]]>One of Brian dePalma’s more obscure credits, this unappreciated attempt to turn Tommy Smothers into a movie star fizzled out. Filmed in 1970 after Hi Mom and before Sisters, it fell victim to a regime change at Warner Bros. and wasn’t released until 1972. But it’s still an offbeat anti-establishment spoof that’s now finally available on dvd through Warner Archive.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/get-know-rabbitt/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/get-know-rabbitt/Scarfacehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/aO5RiqVV8K8/
https://trailersfromhell.com/scarface/#commentsWed, 11 Jul 2018 04:00:24 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=3635Brian de Palma and Oliver Stone’s ultra-violent, over the top remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks classic moves the action to 1980s Miami and provoked a wave of negative reaction to its boisterous excesses. It had to be submitted three times to the MPAA before being cut to qualify for an R rating. Yet today...

]]>Brian de Palma and Oliver Stone’s ultra-violent, over the top remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks classic moves the action to 1980s Miami and provoked a wave of negative reaction to its boisterous excesses. It had to be submitted three times to the MPAA before being cut to qualify for an R rating. Yet today it’s one of the most fervently admired of cult classics, particularly in hip hop circles. The network tv version removed 32 minutes of sex, violence and profanity, but added a number of scenes from the cutting room floor, many of which are included in the Blu-ray release.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/scarface/feed/1https://trailersfromhell.com/scarface/Village of the Damned (1960)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/_0538LOQ23g/
https://trailersfromhell.com/village-of-the-damned-1960/#commentsTue, 10 Jul 2018 18:52:43 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34312 Inquiring minds want to know — why you’re thinking about a BRICK WALL. John Wyndham’s diabolically clever alien invasion fantasy is taken straight from nature: children fathered by who-knows-what are found to possess a hive mentality and brain-powers that we puny Earthlings cannot oppose. Is it simply Us against Them, or was this perhaps...

Inquiring minds want to know — why you’re thinking about a BRICK WALL. John Wyndham’s diabolically clever alien invasion fantasy is taken straight from nature: children fathered by who-knows-what are found to possess a hive mentality and brain-powers that we puny Earthlings cannot oppose. Is it simply Us against Them, or was this perhaps a paranoid image of anti-social, dangerous 1950s teens? The CineSavant review is a full essay this time.

The alien invaders of pulp Sci-fi are forever searching for human females for mating purposes. Even Susan Sontag made a point of this in her famous essay The Imagination of Disaster, discussing the social relevance of catastrophic fantasies like Toho’s The Mysterians. Author John Wyndham was a master of sci-fi stories that that were essentially British. His imagined disasters came complete with wide social effects, like the plague of man-eating plants in his The Day of the Triffids. Almost as popular as that best-seller, Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos is probably Wyndham’s best book. His narrative logic is impeccable. Weird scientific mysteries are followed by further impossibilities that overturn everything dear to the English heart: Order, propriety, civilization itself. Instead of meteor showers and deadly flora, this time it’s an unexplainable ‘Sleeping Beauty’ blackout of a town followed by the simultaneous pregnancy of every woman capable of bearing children. Cuckoos are birds that lay their eggs in the nests of another species so that other mothers can be tricked into raising them. They say that ‘Life will find a way,’ but it’s an unethical jungle out there.

The 1960 MGM thriller Village of the Damned is a fairly faithful telling of the first two-thirds of this story. A mysterious unexplainable blackout surrounds the hamlet of Midwich. All those that enter fall unconscious. The Army uses canary cages on long poles to chart the region of the effect, and determines that Midwich is covered by an invisible dome. The effect disappears as mysteriously as it arrived, and things begin to go back to normal — until a few weeks later when the town’s entire population of fecund females turns up pregnant. The children develop more quickly than normal and when born continue to grow at an accelerated (or faster!) rate. Local researcher Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) studies the twelve ‘different ones’ starting with his own son David (Martin Stephens). The children all look the same. When old enough they dress the same, and band together against the other village kids, like a gang.

The Hive and the Mighty

Things become sinister when the children are discovered to possess a communal intelligence, a ‘hive mind.’ What one knows, they all know. Then Gordon realizes that they can read our thoughts. When they concentrate, they can telepathically force their will on humans, controlling others’ actions by remote control. A baby strikes out against his own mother, compelling her to harm herself. A near-miss car accident spells bad luck for the driver when the Midwich children focus their minds in retribution. A vengeful man with a shotgun doesn’t realize that the children can force him to turn that gun on himself. As they come into their full powers, the violent incidents become more malicious.

Wyndham’s control and dignity kept his book from running into censor trouble, as the Midwich Cuckoos echos the superstitious/obscene Alraune concept in a science fiction setting. Instead of a blasphemous artificial insemination, Cuckoos’ inter-species pregnancies resemble a pointedly non- Immaculate Conception. Since even normal pregnancies in movies made Church authorities uncomfortable, this story’s vision of females raped by men from outer space would surely have been considered unadulterated blasphemy. We’re told that MGM had cold feet when various censor and distributor entities judged the film to be in unsavory bad taste. Daily Variety agreed; its reviewer ‘Rich.’ wasn’t amused:

“George Sanders’ name is not enough to sell this rather tired and sick film… the question must cross any (ticket) buyer’s mind why moppets (should) be used in such an unpleasant pic?”

Even more disturbing, this film’s malign aliens are ordinary-looking children. The sordid thriller The Bad Seed rationalized the actions of its murderous moppet in Alraune-like terms, through the obsolete notion of ‘inherited evil.’ Village of the Damned’s blonde-mopped mob of ‘little devils’ that wantonly kill people was not only shocking, it was contrary to acceptable public taste. Was Wyndham inspired by the rise of youth violence on the streets?

Juvenile delinquency as a modern problem emerged in the middle of WW2 in both the U.S. and the U.K.. Unsupervised adolescents got into trouble and formed unauthorized associations outside of the family … to wit, gangs. The kids in Village of the Damned are a little mob of pre- Droog, pre- X-Men mutant freaks. Their fathers are not human: would the taboo broken in this instance be miscegenation or bestiality? The children look as if the alien half of their chromosomes is dominant, with an alien consciousness prevailing in whatever life form they mate with.

The children are very aware of their ‘other-ness.’ They have identical blonde hair, calm rounded faces, dark eyes. They wear identical black raincoats with the cool fashion conformity that has become a given in neo- Sci-fi. I’ve often wondered if the blonde ‘Midwich’ wigs were hand-me downs previously worn by the Eloi in George Pal/MGM’s The Time Machine, or vice-versa.

Three years later when the Beatles came along and millions of kids started growing their hair long, establishment backlash reacted much the same as the confused adults in Midwich. The Beatles brought forth editorials about ‘losing control of youth’ to some malign anti-social purpose that threatened families and churches. With our un-formed social consciences, we ’60s kids on some level also identified with the Mr. Spock-like cool emotions and the purposeful uniformity of the Midwich Mob … it’s a revolution, man. Everything’s going to change. Wyndham revisited this idea of ‘different’ youth with political notions in his book The Chrysalids.

The Midwich children’s communal instinct and communal mind evoke fears of Communism and enforced conformity engendered by top Science Fiction like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Their super-intelligence is a byproduct of the hive mind; as George Sanders’ Zellaby puts it, they’re “one mind to the power of twelve.” Their twelve consciousnesses are really one, much like the composite alien beings in Quatermass 2. Zellaby’s ‘son’ David is only half-human. His other dominant half follows a loyalty to his own kind far stronger than his affection for his mother.

Much like H.G. Wells’ giant children in his The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, the Midwich Cuckoos consider themselves a different species altogether. Once threatened, they are dangerous competitors with humankind. Food of the Gods ends with a war beginning between humans and giants, and Wyndham’s book goes a lot farther than does the movie in showing the military quarantine of Midwich. Both books examine the natural law that living things will fight to survive and prevail over opposing species, and that this applies to people as well, whatever their moral illusions. Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg’s happy-speak motto ‘Life will find a way’ can be more accurately interpreted as ‘Dog Eat Dog.’

“Beware the Stare that Bewitches! Beware the Stare that will Paralyze the Will of the World!”

The notoriety of Village of the Damned spread when we heard about its then- unique visual gimmicks. When delivering the babies Dr. Willers notes that they all have the same ‘strange eyes,’ without further comment. Later on, when the toddlers are learning to use their telepathic powers, glowing irises are superimposed over their eyes. The effect is unnerving, instantly changing a baby into a demon. The necessity of freezing the frame for these shots results in beautiful static visuals. Groups of staring children are arrayed in disturbing compositions that become chilling tableaux. Remember children’s stare-down games, to see who flinches first? Rigid staring is hypnotic in itself — perhaps we believe that a staring face is seeing our hidden thoughts, or perhaps it becomes a reflection of feared madness, chaos. I think that Ingmar Bergman exploited this ‘dare stare’ phenomenon for certain oneiric shots in his art film Persona.

“You’re thinking … of a brick wall.”

To illustrate another invisible psychological event Village of the Damned adapts silent-movie expressionist imagery — or is it a cinematic variation on a cartoon thought balloon? The crumbling of Gordon Zellaby’s defensive mental wall under the bombardment of the children’s telepathic assault is depicted directly, superimposing an image of a literal brick wall breaking down. This ‘visual simile’ technique mostly disappeared with sound pictures. Gordon is putting up a mental firewall by concentrating on the exact image we see. The little mind-reader David Zellaby sees the same image, and the crumbling of the wall represents the children’s mental onslaught. The visual conceit renders an invisible process in physical terms.

A much less successful visual is the film’s final shot, in which disembodied eyes appear to survive the fire. The spook-ride gag may scare small children, but it doesn’t fit well with what’s gone before, unless we’re all going to be haunted by alien ghosts. I’m thinking that it was a last-minute inspiration to leave the audience shivering. The music cue is pretty effective.

Also striking is the film’s heightened level of sadism. The children are soon killing whenever they feel threatened. The disconnect in 1960 came via the contradictory images of ‘innocent’ children dispassionately committing grotesque murders. They force adults to be witnesses as well. The normalizing of emotionless slaughter would soon become a common factor in ‘cool’ 1960s thrillers and spy pictures, with their hit men and assassins.

The bulk of the movie plays on a much more mundane level, with good and bad effects. The slow buildup to the ‘time out’ in Midwich is excellent, as are Gordon Zellaby’s early behavior experiments with Midwich’s growing batch of mystery moppets. Elsewhere it bogs down a little. We readily believe that the socially disruptive pregnancies would cause all kinds of domestic and community problems. Unable to discuss clinical details (are the pregnant virgins physically intact?) the movie’s dramatics fall back on conservative husband-wife conflicts.

This story is a real gut-punch to English motherhood. The women of Midwich are the ones to suffer the direct effects of this alien invasion, but Village downplays their plight. We mostly feel their anguish through male characters. When the pregnancy hysteria is afoot, we merely hear Laurence Naismith’s town Doctor Willers reporting about attempted suicides; when seeing his ’embarrassed’ female patients, he’s unable to look them in the face. Like any good Sci-fi scientist, Sanders is unemotional and somewhat sexless. His relationship with his much younger wife does not seem particularly physical. The men of the village aren’t much help either. When the going gets tough they abandon their spouses and find solace in ale ‘n’ quail bonding at the pub.

Poor Anthea Zellaby (Hammer queen Barbara Shelley) gets very little respect from this story. Her husband is a wet noodle and her mystery child rejects her unequivocally. The name Anthea suggests that Gordon considers her just another rose in his garden. Her ‘feminine intuition’ bears comparison to the aliens’ telepathic powers, but the screenwriters don’t make the connection. The most powerful shock cut in the film is to the sight of Anthea plunging her arm into scalding water, accompanied by a James Bernard-like musical explosion. It’s the only fully-expressed female trauma in the picture: Shelley flails violently and her excellent mime tells us that she’s harming herself against her own will. The equally uptight Hammer films didn’t exploit the full range of female power either.

An unintentional laugh (at least when I saw the film for the first time in 1970) came when the women of Midwich queue up at an aid station to be told that they are all pregnant. Just as we realize that that every Jill in town has the same problem, the movie cuts directly to Zellaby’s large German Shepherd. Gee, is the dog preggers too? Are there going to be little puppies running around with blonde wigs between their ears?

Gordon Zellaby’s mind isn’t on Anthea, but on trying to see the larger picture of the Midwich event. What do the kids want? The film keeps hinting that the children are aware of their status as spearheads for invasion. Like smug little spies, they stay mum in school when Zellaby questions them about the possibility of life on other planets: “It would be better if you didn’t ask these questions. We want to learn from you.” The kids are firmly established as tight-lipped conspirators, in a Them versus Us conflict. There’s no question that the malevolent little brainiacs need to be exterminated. The only question is, how?

John Wyndham’s book presents more than one possibility for the genesis of The Children, just as the origin of his Triffids is never fully determined. Disc commentator Steve Haberman points out that in the book, aerial photos include a sighting of what might be a flying saucer in the town square during the Blackout. That suggests that space aliens landed and physically assaulted the women of Midwich. I strongly remember that the book also held the idea that the women might have been impregnated by ‘radio waves’ from outer space. The authorities in the film discuss this as well: “Do you imply that these children may be the result of impulses directed towards us from somewhere in the universe?” This brings us right back to the delicate question of whether or not the pregnant virgins of Midwich are still virgins. Unlike the book, the screenwriters give us scenes with women inside Midwich during the Blackout — and no saucers or aliens are present. So I’m sticking with the intergalactic ‘pregnancy waves’ theory.

Both the book and the movie tell us that simultaneous alien colonies have been attempted, in other parts of the world. Like the Boll Weevil lookin’ for a home, these aliens are simply spreading their seed around the galaxy, starting new colonies and outposts that do not know their origin. Every species of animal and race of man does this to the full limit of its capability. Scared kids watching Damned are likely freaked out about those staring eyes, so that’s what we see at the fade-out.

In the book, I believe one of the Cuckoos is killed somehow, leaving Zellaby’s little colony with an odd number of boys and girls. This problem of uneven mates was retained for John Carpenter’s dreary Village of the Damned remake. The boy-girl mismatch is also an issue among the innocent children in Losey’s These are the Damned. The solution is a Strangelove-like polygamy, I suppose.

Village of the Damned was competently filmed on the same village location seen in The Dirty Dozen and Hammer Films’ Die! Die! My Darling! It’s the tiny village with the little race track-like rail around a triangular common. Wolf Rilla’s direction is inspired in the opening Blackout sequence. A Victrola winding down suggests the town going to sleep quite nicely. It brings backs memories of the besieged English hamlet in Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? Everything directly associated with the children is also carefully directed, with many subjective moving camera shots.

George Sanders clearly was interested in the intelligent story, for he plays his role straight. Fantasy familiars Michael Gwynne and Laurence Naismith also lend solid credibility to the frequent bouts of exposition. As noted above, Barbara Shelley is the acting standout, but her role seems minimized.

The child actors playing the kids are extremely effective — they are by turns terrifying and nightmarish. Although they number twelve we often see just six or seven, directed to be calm-faced but alert, like mannequins or classic statuary. Menacing facial expressions do slip through, spoiling the alien vibe with recognizable human egos.

The film’s star performance is little Martin Stephens, who gives David Zellaby an intelligent poise far beyond his years. He also suggests David’s ‘human side’ suppressed by his dominant alien personality. His farewell to his mother seems almost a parody of a normal kid refusing to be emotional. But David also seems very human just after a killing, when he betrays a hint of a proud smile.

I once corresponded with actor Martin Stephens, who now lives in Portugal. He claimed that he wasn’t dubbed, and a large part of the film’s eerie charge is conveyed by the cautious calculation in his voice. Stephens would be even more precocious — and creepy — in the next year’s The Innocents.

Savant was too young to see Village of the Damned when new and was prevented from doing so by a mother who picked up on the same ‘sick’ elements noted in the Variety review. But I did a lot of staring at the poster (I remember it played the day after Butterfield 8 at the Air Base Theater) and was impressed by one viewing of a TV spot. For years afterwards I had scary nightmares featuring, of all things, the TV spot’s image of people waking up and climbing out of a disabled bus!

The Warner Archive CollectionBlu-ray of Village of the Damned is the expected flawless encoding of this Sci-fi classic. The picture has always looked fine on every film and video format; if you saw it flat on TV long ago, the widescreen framing helps greatly with the overall effect. The cinematography goes in for what in 1960 passed as a neutral documentary look, until those creepy sequences with the static framing and stylized compositions. But just the sight of the blonde children walking like a little pack of Droogs can be quite unnerving.

(the image at right is by artist Jay Stephens— thanks to Gorn Captain for the link→)

The music works in some places and not in others, pushing ‘sweet countryside’ moods and those rather silly marches that indicate that Midwich’s male cuckolds are on the move. A fairly predictable sustained musical effect appears whenever the kids engage their superhuman telepathic powers. Oddly, the signature audio effect is not heard in the inquest scene, when the children interfere telepathically with Anthea’s testimony, ‘clouding her mind.’ But it is heard even when the newborn David Zellaby is in his crib — it disturbs Gordon’s dog. Gordon then stares into David’s basinette, as if David were Rosemary’s Baby.

The Blu-ray edition includes a trailer (which adds a ‘The’ to the title) and a good commentary from author Steve Haberman. He brings up several of the points mentioned above. Haberman’s insights about the apocryphal English cut of the film are fascinating *, as is his discussion of how the ‘blasphemy’ issue stalled the movie’s production for three years. Did MGM perhaps option Wyndham’s 1957 book in galley form?

Is the film sick and blasphemous? Larry Cohen would go right to the heart of the virgin birth idea in his ’70s film God Told Me To, where a mutant Messiah is born when a woman is impregnated by aliens. Cohen clearly delights in upsetting church apple carts whenever the opportunity arises. Both his film and Wolf Rilla’s imply by extrapolation that Jesus could have been the son of an alien being. Frankly, the Christian concepts of mercy and pacifism sometimes do seem alien to the core human character; maybe some alien DNA is what’s needed around here.

*Note from helpful correspondent Sergio Angelini, 7.12.18:Dear Glenn, really enjoyed your review of the Blu-ray release of the original version of Village of the Damned, one of my favourite British films of the 1960s. I noticed you refer to the story of the ‘British cut’of the film, without the glowing eyes effect, as being apocryphal. I can confirm that the British cut doesn’t have the effect – I saw it a couple of years ago on 35mm projected at the National Film Theatre here in London. The effect is very curious as you get these long static shots of the children staring with nothing happening. Incidentally, I assume in most cases the effects were not actual freeze frames but rather production stills shot on the set, possibly made with a medium format size neg using a Hasselblad, and then the eye effect was animated / rotoscoped by Tom Howard. All the very best, Sergio.

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.

Smash Palace is the wryly grandiose name given to a New Zealand junkyard run by Al Shaw, a tight-lipped workaholic up to his elbows in axle grease and resentment. It also describes the wreck Al has made of his own marriage.

At the beginning of Roger Donaldson’s 1982 film, Shaw and his wife Jacqui are already nearing the end of their rocky alliance – both work at the family business but the family is all Al’s – Jacqui has finally come to terms that she wants no part of it.

Shaw, a burly pub crawler with deep set eyes and the thinnest of skins is an occasional auto jockey who appreciates a finely-tuned V8 but understands little about the niceties of married life. Jacqui is tired of Al’s brooding and sick of their circumstances, a dead-end existence anchored to a home that’s not much more than a shanty mired in a sea of trashed Pontiacs.

The battle lines are drawn in that heap of metal; Jacqui stares out her back window and is confronted by “a graveyard” – Al sees home, sweet home.

Their only moments of tranquility are inspired by their little daughter Georgie – but after eight years of glowering silence and contentious sex that looks more like assault, Jacqui leaves Al and takes the child with her. Building up a steady boil for those same eight years, Al snaps – he kidnaps Georgie and heads into the bush.

Al is the New Zealand cousin to one of Bruce Springsteen’s dead-end anti-heroes, fighting sleep behind the wheel at 2 AM, lost to themselves and whatever family they’ve left behind. Bruno Lawrence, a transplanted rock drummer from West Sussex, effortlessly embodies that man, his compassion disguised by machismo and his common sense betrayed by a quick temper (Lawrence brought so much of himself to the film that Donaldson gave him a writing credit).

Al’s saving grace is the sardonic humor that bubbles up in the most dire situations – including the film’s finale, a violent confrontation with the man who he believes stole his wife and child.

Sitting on a railroad track with a shotgun wired to the neck of his former friend and current hostage, Al relaxes in the driver’s seat as a wickedly fast train barrels down on them. Al is finally able to meet life on his own terms, displaying a final middle finger to his tormentors and the world in general.

Donaldson funded the film through the New Zealand Film Commission, a humiliating experience in itself: the project was rejected until the commission was reminded that it was Donaldson’s break through drama, Sleeping Dogs, that helped forge the existence of the commission.

His direction of Smash Palace is a master class in invasive filmmaking – Donaldson stations his camera so close to the actors in their most intimate moments that the audience feels implicated in an unwanted threesome.

The actors are uniformly fine – Anna Jemison’s naturalistic and low key performance reveals Jacqui’s ambiguity about her own feelings and the impulsive streak that made Al a proper soulmate, at least at the beginning of their marriage. A few of the other actors, including Jacqui’s reluctant beau Keith Aberdein and Greer Robson (little Georgie all grown up) are interviewed in the 50 minute documentary included on the new Blu ray release from Arrow.

Arrow’s transfer of Graeme Cowley’s unsentimental cinematography looks perfectly appropriate (Donaldson was not interested in capturing the glory of a New Zealand sunset but revealing the mystery behind Jacqui’s melancholy smile). Here’s the official run-down of the disc’s extras via Arrow’s site:

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/smash-palace/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/smash-palace/sex, lies, and videotapehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/uYeBvRnnmnU/
https://trailersfromhell.com/sex-lies-and-videotape/#commentsTue, 10 Jul 2018 17:44:13 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34311 Is this show still as daring as it once seemed? How does it fare in this year of #MeToo? Where are the personal boundaries in relationships, when nobody can risk being entirely honest? We discover a man who wants to relate with women solely through the recordings he makes of them talking about sex...

Is this show still as daring as it once seemed? How does it fare in this year of #MeToo? Where are the personal boundaries in relationships, when nobody can risk being entirely honest? We discover a man who wants to relate with women solely through the recordings he makes of them talking about sex — is that OK, or not OK? Steven Soderbergh’s micro-budgeted intimate drama was the definition of independent filmmaking success.

Director Steve Soderbergh has been making features for almost thirty years, as one of the few filmmakers to find something resembling working freedom in Hollywood’s unforgiving power structure. He’s taken on everything from expensive mainstream thrillers to science fiction remakes to personal movie experiments filmed on video. He’s also served as the director of photography on a number of his films. Soderbergh’s not the kind of director to sign up to do a Bond epic, but making films with the likes of George Clooney, et. al., has won him added wiggleroom in a confining industry. He’s quit once or twice, moved on to success on cable TV, and made entire features on an iPhone.

Back in 1989 Soderbergh arrived as a key figure in the newly emerging Independent Film scene. After directing a movie about the music group Yes, he put this show together by writing a script that attracted actors in need of breakout roles. James Spader was stuck playing snide collegiate-age villains. Ex-model Andie MacDowell was considered an acting washout after the producers of Greystoke: The Legend ofTarzan, Lord of the Apes decided to re-dub her entire performance with the voice of Glenn Close. Soderbergh’s tiny movie project didn’t amuse his actors’ money-minded Hollywood agents. Newcomer Laura San Giacomo had to threaten to change representation to get her agency to cooperate.

Filmed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sex, lies, and videotape is a intimate relationship movie that makes an asset of modest resources. The story stays focused on four main characters in a handful of principal settings. The camerawork is attractive but un-showy and no fancy editing or effects tricks are utilized. It’s all about the four leads, each of whom gets plenty of face time to fully express Soderbergh’s excellent dialogue.

The movie is about sexual-social dysfunction among adults in the new age of sexual candor. Married housewife Ann Mullaney (Andie MacDowell) is uncomfortable with sex and must be coaxed by her analyst (Ron Vawter) to talk about it. She feels something is not right with her husband John (Peter Gallagher), but fears that it might be her imagination. As it turns out, John is callously unfaithful to Ann. Smugly confident that she will not find out, he tomcats away from his duties as an attorney to spend time with Ann’s own sister, the uninhibited Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo).

The situational dynamic is complicated, to say the least, but Soderbergh allows each character to express a full inner life. Ann and Cynthia don’t get along, as Ann disapproves of Cynthia’s blunt talk about sexuality and lax commitment to their mother. Cynthia has pegged her sister as an uptight bore. Although she bears no intentional malice, Cynthia is clearly getting back at her sister on some level, while satisfying her own urges.

The catalyst that interrupts this triangle comes straight from the Acme school of cinematic contrivances, yet works within the context of the story. Ann is upset that John has invited an old college friend to stay with them while he searches for an apartment of his own. Graham Dalton (James Spader) turns out to be not another annoying ex- frat boy like John, but a sensitive and somewhat enigmatic loner, a drifter who deflects direct questions about himself. Graham shows no interest in reconnecting with his old local girlfriend, and spends a lot of time alone in his new apartment. Ann is intrigued, while Cynthia sees him as a potential new conquest. John thinks Graham is just weird.

John’s right, but Graham’s weirdness is made for the movies, as it were. He harbors a Peeping Tom– like obsession that both Ann and Cynthia, in their independent contact with him, find fascinating. Graham has been videotaping women he meets answering intimate questions about their sexuality and what turns them on. It’s his substitute for a conventional sex life — he tells Ann that he’s impotent, but only around other people. Graham’s gentle and benign manner impresses both women — the reckless Cynthia soon volunteers to become one of Graham’s videotape love objects, while Ann’s initial reaction is fear and revulsion. But Ann and Graham also sense that they have a strong mutual attraction.

Soderbergh’s film would at first seem to place the multi-sided love triangle in simple soap opera terms: John is a despicable cad, Cynthia is a reckless menace and Ann is a faultless old-fashioned lady experiencing difficulties in liberated times. Oddball freak Graham upsets the kettle — he’s sexually dysfunctional and engaged in a daring audiovisual sex world of his own invention. Graham now seems an early example of a J.G. Ballard- like case of humans melding with their technology. His unorthodox ‘sexual orientation’ is effected through 1988 electronics — a Hi-8mm video camera that uses little videotape cartridges. (Tell me about it, I have a drawer full of them, with important video of my children, that I now cannot play.)

It’s not often that we meet ‘characters’ this multi-dimensional; they’re like real people in that we mainly discover that there’s a lot more to learn about them. The story’s promised sex adventures turn out to be an exercise in sex therapy. A liberal interpretation of the romantic outcomes would forgive all the characters with the excuse that sexuality has no logic and stable relationships need a deeper foundation based on trust. Thus the clueless but honest Ann gravitates toward the ‘dangerously candid’ Graham, while Cynthia learns her lesson and expresses a sincere desire to atone for her disloyalty. John’s excuse for adultery, that Ann is frigid, is completely undercut. He is chastened by a video confrontation with his spouse, whom he discovers has sensual dimensions he never bothered to investigate.

A popular hit and a hot discussion topic in 1989, sex, lies, and videotape is fairly conventional in moral terms. We’re encouraged to thrill at John and Cynthia’s risky shenanigans, within reason: “Well, get your balls in the air and get your butt over here.” Ill-chosen actions have consequences, although nothing drastic happens, as would occur in a soap from an earlier decade. John is a big loser at home and at work, and forfeits his playmate as well. Cynthia (rather inconsistently but charmingly) matures in her appreciation of interpersonal responsibilities. Graham and Ann finish in sort of a trendy limbo, sitting cool and comfortable on a porch step, each a mellow individual yet comfortable as a potential couple. Undefined and amorphous relationships with no discernable future always look good in the movies. I almost want Graham to turn to Ann and say, “You know, I’ve got a lot more kinky ideas I haven’t told you yet …” For all she knows, he’s been crisscrossing the country in his convertible because he’s on the run from the law. I mean, he’s a guy obsessed with not having too many keys to worry about.

To return to the #MeToo debate, in this viewing James Spader’s Graham seems all right. He’s not aggressive with the females he meets, and he spells out exactly what he wants up front: if his modus operandi is too freaky they are perfectly free to bolt. Of course, Graham is a lot more attractive than the average guy who needs to ‘explain’ his personal preferences to a prospective lover, before things go too far. I doubt that many people like him exist; I would think that the average weird guy who brings a video recorder to a date has more intrusive and privacy-threatening ideas in mind.

Frankly, I think Graham’s magic key to putting women at ease should be obvious: he listens to them. Meaningful intimate communication is likely a lot more important to successful human relationships than sex. For a standoffish social misfit who sublimates his sex drive into ‘interesting’ behaviors, he’s nevertheless compatible with the needs of a lot of women — that’s a pretty full box of videotapes.

I liked the reaction my fellow Cannon Group employees had to the film — all of a sudden some of them, even the women, were talking about the picture and sex like adults. Everybody’s going to relate to Soderbergh’s film differently; for me the point of the picture is that all interpersonal relationships are risky, and that no set rules can be laid down. At the finish we don’t know if Ann will coax Graham toward a more conventional relationship, or if he’ll continue as he has before. As long as what works isn’t exploitative, most anything goes.

sex, lies, and videotape really hit the spot in 1989, winning major awards at Cannes and rushing Soderbergh into the industry spotlight. Besides a Palm D’Or win for Soderbergh, James Spader won as best actor. He, Andie MacDowell and Laura San Giacomo would each be rewarded with a major career boost.

The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray of sex, lies and videotape is a brand-new 4K digital revisit, with an optional new 5.1 surround mix from the original sound elements, all supervised by director Steven Soderbergh. Sony issued its own very good Blu-ray ten years ago, but this one is much smoother visually, and has a soundtrack completely remixed from the original recordings.

The real draw should be the new extras. Present here is an older, excellent Steven Soderbergh/Neil LaBute commentary. Soderbergh’s commentaries are always fascinating; I can’t recommend highly enough his track with Mike Nichols on the old DVD of Catch-22. His intelligence, candor and CALM make everything he says seem twice as valid. The director also offers commentary for a single deleted scene between Ann and her analyst. Soderbergh is present for two vintage TV appearances, one not-bad interview with Dick Cavett and a second appearance on the Today Show.

The new extras are even more detailed and involving. Soderbergh introduces the picture on a new B&W video that didn’t do much for me, at least not on a first view. But his diary excerpts and early-career explanation in the insert booklet are excellent reading. Two new featurettes find the cast members (minus Spader) getting deep into their characters once more. Peter Gallagher relates his character to the Reagan years and Laura San Giacomo relates to a watch she has saved from her wardrobe for the picture. The busy actor James Spader is conspicuously absent, except for an interview from the time of the original release.

A detailed piece about the various audio mixes for the movie is quite good too — audio mixer Larry Blake and the composer Cliff Martinez explain how the mixers overcame heavy generator noise built- into the original dialogue tracks of this all-talking picture. The before / after demos add up to a learning experience, for once.

A trailer is present. I edited the first promos for s,l, and v for its initial press kit back in 1989; I have a feeling that Soderbergh looked at what we did — edited strictly to ad/pub formula — and swore to retain control of publicity from that point forward. After a clip plays on his Cavett interview, he immediately blanches at the quality of the film transfer. I think it’s likely that I was using a film transfer with the not-so-good mix of the print shown at Cannes.

The director-approved disc comes in a new-style packaging for Criterion, a card and plastic disc holder in a clear plastic sleeve that carries the cover text, leaving the image of Andie MacDowell’s cover photo undisturbed. The rather cool package is likely not as durable as a normal keep case, and tucking it all back together takes a bit of aligning effort. People often end up getting discs out or putting them away in the dark, or when holding a drink in one hand. Is this just for the one disc?

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

sex, lies and videotapeBlu-rayrates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Audio commentary with Soderbergh and filmmaker Neil LaBute (1998); Interviews with Soderbergh (1990, 1992), James Spader (1989); New making-of docu with Peter Gallagher, Andie MacDowell, and Laura San Giacomo; new intro by Soderburgh, new conversation between sound editor/re-recording mixer Larry Blake and composer Cliff Martinez; Deleted scene with commentary by Soderbergh; Demonstration of sound restorations through the years, trailers. Insert essay by critic Amy Taubin and (Blu-ray only) excerpts from Soderbergh’s 1990 book about the film.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray and booklet in a card and plastic disc holder in a clear plastic sleeve.
Reviewed: July 9, 2018(5772sex)

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https://trailersfromhell.com/carrie/#respondMon, 09 Jul 2018 04:00:05 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34295Stephen King’s potboiler about a troubled teen with psychic powers was all the inspiration Brian De Palma needed to create a modern classic combining bloody exploitation shocks with brilliantly played dysfunctional family drama. Audiences were beguiled by Sissy Spacek’s heartbreaking portrayal of the ultimate wallflower while terrified by Piper Laurie’s hilarious and horrifying mom-from-hell. Both...

]]>Stephen King’s potboiler about a troubled teen with psychic powers was all the inspiration Brian De Palma needed to create a modern classic combining bloody exploitation shocks with brilliantly played dysfunctional family drama. Audiences were beguiled by Sissy Spacek’s heartbreaking portrayal of the ultimate wallflower while terrified by Piper Laurie’s hilarious and horrifying mom-from-hell. Both Spacek and Laurie were nominated for Oscars.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/carrie/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/carrie/A Matter of Life and Deathhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/RlhF5dDyleg/
https://trailersfromhell.com/a-matter-of-life-and-death/#commentsSat, 07 Jul 2018 17:38:17 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34272 The wonder movie of 1946 sees the Archers infusing the ‘Film Blanc’ fantasy with amazing images and powerful emotions. Imagination and resourcefulness accomplishes miracles on a Stairway to Heaven, with visual effects never bettered in the pre-CGI era. Michael Powell’s command of the screen overpowers a soon-obsoleted theme about U.S.- British relations. A Matter...

The wonder movie of 1946 sees the Archers infusing the ‘Film Blanc’ fantasy with amazing images and powerful emotions. Imagination and resourcefulness accomplishes miracles on a Stairway to Heaven, with visual effects never bettered in the pre-CGI era. Michael Powell’s command of the screen overpowers a soon-obsoleted theme about U.S.- British relations.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger came into their own making wartime movies, most of which steered far clear of the accepted definition of propaganda. After their Anglo-Dutch unity epic One of Our Aircraft is Missing, The Archers’ follow-up tale of Nazi perfidy The Silver Fleet was handed off to another team of directors. Instead of more morale-builders about sacrifice to the flag, Powell & Pressburger actually took a critical look at England, examining cultural contradictions in the military (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) and odd eccentricity in the countryside (A Canterbury Tale). But each film struck a vein of ‘Englishness’ in a way that promoted the English way of life as something well worth preserving. A Matter of Life and Death (re-titled Stairway to Heaven for America) was produced just as the war ended. An unusually creative fantasy that strains the limits of the Technicolor process, it’s also the closest the Archers came to a standard message picture. The government asked them, to come up with something to encourage postwar harmony between England and the United States.

The Archers’ films seem deeply concerned with how England might change after the hoped-for victory. I Know Where I’m Going! makes a plea not to return to the status quo, to free England’s future from selfish business interests. A Matter of Life and Death seems worried that former Allies may have a falling-out. The odd arena for this debate is an ethereal fantasy with its own vision of a celestial hereafter. It becomes personal when we realize that it may exist only in the mind of a British flier who has survived an air crash against all odds.

Flying Officer Peter Carter (David Niven) and American WAC June (Kim Hunter) meet and fall in love over the radio, when Peter reports that he’s trapped in a burning plane, with no parachute. Peter wakes up on a beach, alive but suffering from concussion damage that Doctor Frank Reeves [left] (Roger Livesey of I Know Where I’m Going!) plans to cure with a risky brain operation. But Peter experiences the crisis in the form of bizarre hallucinations. A heavenly emissary known as Conductor 71 (Marius Goring) arrives to escort Peter to the afterlife. Peter refuses to go with the 18th- century French dandy, arguing that his miraculous survival and romance with June are events that Heaven didn’t count on, and shouldn’t revoke. As Peter is wheeled into the operating room, a celestial court convenes to determine his fate.

The premise is an elaborate variation on the film blanc form, that fantasy subgenre dealing with heavenly waiting rooms and ‘lost souls’ in limbo between terra firma and the heavenly gates: Heaven Can Wait, Liliom, Between Two Worlds. Reversing the particulars of Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the heavenly bureaucracy in Powell and Pressburger’s story must deal with a mix-up that leaves a mortal alive when he should be dead. In this case, Earth is in Technicolor, and Heaven in B&W. A properly ethereal angel (Kathleen Byron [right] of Black Narcissus) dressed as a servicewoman presides over a glassy reception hall that offers a Coca-Cola machine for the comfort of American fliers. It’s basically the same setup as MGM’s A Guy Named Joe, minus that film’s vindictive, ugly suggestion that non-Allied aviators go straight to Hell — remember, instead of demonizing Germans, the Archers’ Colonel Blimp made a major character a sympathetic German. All of this heavenly hoo-haw is kept on the edge of ambiguity — it could all simply be a figment of Peter’s concussion. The notion that dreams and reality can coexist is further echoed in rehearsal scenes for an amateur play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Heaven is populated by multitudes from every culture and time period, which accounts for Conductor 71’s presence as Peter’s personal contact man; the 18th- century Frenchman makes jests on how he lost his head to the guillotine. Marius Goring is given the film’s most famous line, upon arrival in the full-color real world: “Ah, how one is starved for Technicolor up there!”

Peter’s trial resonates with the classic legal battle in William Dieterle’s film blanc The Devil and Daniel Webster. The prosecutor is a Yankee patriot from the American war of independence, the stern Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey). Farlan would rather not see the Boston-bred June entangled with a no-account Englishman, especially one that ought to be dead. Alfred Junge’s designs make the fantastic heavenly trial a wonder to behold, but it’s also the weakest part of the film, sort of a public service message for Uncle Sam to lend a helping hand to its former ally. The war finished with England a financial wreck, exhausted on all fronts. Powell and Pressburger’s mission was to counter U.S. grumblings that America shouldn’t be aiding a monarchy still ruling over a far-flung empire. The film’s fairly inspiring heavenly trial simply emphasizes two countries’ shared traditions and values. The on its own. The sequence is admirable when elevates notions of racial equality, even if its image of happy nations united under the Union Jack is flawed. For help in fighting the war, England had all but promised freedom for key colonies, yet continued to oppose independence movements.

The film’s real emotional climax plays out on a personal level. It’s a replay of the cosmic dilemma from Fritz Lang’s classic silent Destiny (Der müde Tod): faced with a terrible, no-win choice, June volunteers to take Peter’s place in the afterworld. As in Liliom, a single teardrop changes the lovers’ shared fate.

Powell’s visual imagination makes A Matter of Life and Death a sheer wonderment, aided immensely by Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor artistry. Live action is routinely combined with matte overlays of abstract artwork. Dramatic scenes are accompanied by splashes of expressive color, reds and yellows that suffuse the film frame with a stylized theatricality. Dr. Reeves’ camera obscura is like a private cinema that he uses to observe life around his house, while the beginning of the brain operation is seen from Peter’s POV, with the camera peering through a giant set of eyelids.

The beach where Peter Carter washes up is a hazy plain with waves converging on a vanishing point; it’s interesting that 66 years later, when Terence Malick needed a visual to represent the hereafter in The Tree of Life, he fell back on a similarly vast tidewater beach. A subsequent encounter with a nude goatherd convinces Peter that he is indeed dead: “Where do I report?” he inquires. Peter assumes that he’s still an airman, indicating that the B&W heavenly arrival center may only be a figment of his imagination. Visual magic is a major theme.

The big illusions take place in heaven, dominated by a stone escalator that stretches into a galactic infinity. When the two domains meet, B&W combines with full color in several shots. Disembodied ghosts walk through walls, an effect that must have been difficult to achieve in the complex Technicolor printing process. A pink rose marks transitions between worlds, and conveys the tears that prove June’s love. The complex manipulations of the Technicolor process remained a secret for years, and ensured that Jack Cardiff would become an instant camera legend.

Powell and Pressburger’s penchant for eccentricity doesn’t loosen the film’s grip on our emotions. Peter and June have formed a spiritual bond that heaven cannot, as they say, pull asunder. The most memorable images remain the enormous Technicolor close-ups of David Niven and particularly Kim Hunter, radiant at the center of the miracles. A Matter of Life and Death is a playful, reassuring transition between the tragedy of war and the hopes for the future. It’s almost shameful to watch it now — our parents that endured the war years must have felt betrayed by what has been made of the world since then.

The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray of A Matter of Life and Death is a real stunner. Sony released an okay DVD back in 2009 (and we were grateful for it) but it looked no better than the UK Carlton transfers that persisted of most of the color Archers pictures. Remastered in 4K by Sony, this Blu-ray release is like watching an entirely new show. As Criterion proudly explains, the original 3-strip film negatives were scanned and digitally combined, a process that has produced a strikingly clear and colorful image. We now see how perfect is the animated Outer Space prologue that opens the picture … did it perhaps inspire a similar idea for Frank Capra’s holiday movie of the same year?

The film’s color contrasts are now almost painful to the eye. Rendered in a silky B&W, Powell and Jack Cardiff’s Olympian hereafter hums with a futuristic efficiency — with fantasy architecture that improves on Things to Come, on which Cardiff worked as a camera assistant. The blends between the color & B&W realms are beautifully managed as well.

Ian Christie offers a dependably thorough and expert commentary. In Sony’s older intro Martin Scorsese gives us his memories of discovering Michael Powell’s films long before meeting the director. Thelma Schoonmaker’s heartfelt new interview is the best thing on the disc. We learn that Carter’s brain malady is medically accurate for epilepsy, but that the filmmakers weren’t allowed to use that word. Craig McCall spent a large part of the 1990s filming his interview docu on Jack Cardiff, and a shorter piece here concentrates on the cameraman’s experience on AMOLAD, his first major camera credit. Stephanie Zacharek’s concise, inspiring liner note essay is what newbies ought to read first, after witnessing the wonderment of A Matter of Life and Death. Young adults will gasp when told that one bit player, the cherubic flyer smiling in heaven, is none other than Richard Attenborough of Jurassic Park.

We’re told that Alfred Hitchcock recommended Kim Hunter for the film, and other accounts say that both Powell and Pressburger traveled to Hollywood to find their June. But in his biography, Powell describes bicycling a lone print of Hunter’s first film The Seventh Victim across a bombed-out London, to show it to Carol Reed. And we have already learned from Criterion’s own disc extras for A Canterbury Tale that Kim Hunter had filmed extra scenes for the American re-cut of Powell’s earlier A Canterbury Tale.

About that naked goatherd kid on the beach, the one that makes Peter Carter think he’s dead in heaven: I think it’s the same child actor that plays the heroic boy in Alberto Cavalcanti’s Ealing thriller Went the Day Well? At least the voice sounds identical.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/a-matter-of-life-and-death/feed/2https://trailersfromhell.com/a-matter-of-life-and-death/Xtrohttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/o9VilXNKAaQ/
https://trailersfromhell.com/xtro/#commentsSat, 07 Jul 2018 17:32:28 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34271 Nope, this isn’t ET, The Extraterrestrial, not by a long shot. Guest reviewer Lee Broughton offers an assessment of Harry Bromley Davenport’s British cult sci-fi shocker of modest means, a show that would be pure exploitation if not for some creditable performances. It’s nasty but has a basic competence and is not just more...

Nope, this isn’t ET, The Extraterrestrial, not by a long shot. Guest reviewer Lee Broughton offers an assessment of Harry Bromley Davenport’s British cult sci-fi shocker of modest means, a show that would be pure exploitation if not for some creditable performances. It’s nasty but has a basic competence and is not just more cynical grist for the mill. ‘Phone Home,’ my Aunt Fannie: sometimes the difference between a thriller like this and a higher-profile classic is just pretension.

Xtro is an inventive, unpredictable, surreal, reference-laden and strangely moving tale about a loving father-son bond that refuses to be broken by the light years in distance and the monstrous physical transformations that serve to test it. The series of unsettling and gory special effects that lead to the father-son reunion almost resulted in the show being prosecuted as a ‘video nasty’ when it was first released on VHS in the UK. Second Sight’s new Region Free Blu-ray set presents a full four versions of the film.

Sam (Philip Sayer) and his small son Tony (Simon Nash) are enjoying a summer’s day at the family’s country cottage when Sam is suddenly abducted by aliens. With no evidence present to corroborate Tony’s version of events, Sam’s wife Rachel (Bernice Stegers) is forced to conclude that her husband simply left her for another woman. Three years on she is living with a photographer, Joe (Danny Brainin). Nightmares about the abduction have never left Tony and he’s miserable because he doesn’t really like Joe or the French au pair who looks after him, Analise (Maryam d’Abo). Tony remains convinced that he can still feel a tangible connection with his father and he believes that Sam will return one day soon. And it’s a real shock for Rachel and Joe when he does. Sam can’t explain where he’s been but he exhibits lots of strange behaviour and his return appears to be guided by a sinister ulterior motive. When Sam grants Tony telekinetic-like powers, the boy puts them to petulant use just as Rachel and Joe’s relationship starts breaking down. Can anybody stop Sam returning to the stars with Tony in tow?

Xtro possesses a truly terrifying opening scene that really gets the show off to a flying start from which it never lets up. As Sam and Tony enjoy an idyllic day at their country cottage an innocent game of ‘throw the stick for the dog’ has startling consequences. In what is staged like a reference to the ‘thrown bone’ shot from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Sam throws the stick high above the cottage. It freezes in mid-air and the sky suddenly turns jet black and bright lights shoot from the cottage’s windows. There’s a raging wind blowing and Sam is sucked towards a triangular configuration of lights. The intensity of this scene, which is enhanced by Harry Bromley Davenport’s crazed synthesiser soundtrack score and electronic sound effects, still packs a punch 35 years on. Indeed, the mix of sensory overload and convincing panic that Bromley Davenport offers here plays very much like a precursor to Jason Eisener’s equally effective ‘Slumber Party Alien Abduction’ segment from V/H/S/2 (2013). As such, this opening scene is the first in a relentless series of highly accomplished set-pieces and unpredictable plot twists that are by turn bizarre, surreal, shocking, disturbing, moving and scary.

It seems that New Line Cinema’s Robert Shaye can take credit for being the driving force behind some of Xtro’s weirder and more unpredictable moments. When executive producers are hands-on types that make strict demands of their filmmakers it can spell disaster. Here it seems that unwanted interventions by Shaye actually had a fortuitously positive effect. It’s noted in the disc’s extra features that Shaye actively demanded that Bromley Davenport and producer Mark Forstater pursued a more ‘off the wall’ approach when they were finalising the script and readying to shoot the film. He stipulated that a number of seemingly incongruous elements should be included in the show, a prime example being the panther that suddenly starts prowling around Rachel’s apartment. The neat and noticeable background details and elements of mise-en-scene that Bromley Davenport and acclaimed art director Andrew Mollo expertly worked into the film in order to offer some justification — however slim or enigma-laden that justification might be — for the presence of these more surreal elements served to turn Xtro into something of a puzzle movie: that distinct breed of cult film that demands repeated viewings in the hope that the answers to its enigmas will eventually be revealed by a previously unnoticed clue.

In the course of seeking something ‘off the wall’ Shaye offered Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979) as a point of reference for the kind of vibe that he was looking for. Interestingly, there are similarities between Xtro’s and Phantasm’s central narratives that seemingly allowed Xtro to be readily infused with a really effective oneiric air akin to that which runs through Coscarelli’s film. On one level Phantasm can be read as a film that has the theme of childhood anxiety provoked by loss through bereavement at its centre. And the film features odd disorientating moments where we wonder whether Mike’s (Michael Baldwin) encounters with the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) are dreams that his subconscious mind has generated in order to help him process and work through his grief. Similarly, on one level Xtro can be read as a film that has the theme of childhood anxiety provoked by loss through parental separation at its centre and there are odd disorientating moments here where we wonder whether Tony’s dreams about his father’s alien abduction — and his other night terrors — have simply been generated by his subconscious mind in its efforts to help him process and work through the fact that his father has simply left the family for a new life with a new partner.

Strange enigmas and oneiric atmospheres aside, other elements in Xtro fleetingly bring to mind Phantasm: a deadly blade-lined yo-yo that functions like the Tall Man’s flying spheres, a nighttime woodland set finale where a ferocious windstorm generated by extra terrestrial activity impedes the progress of the show’s protagonists, and a high contrast bleached out sterile white room that contains alien eggs as opposed to crushed down human cadavers in plastic canisters. Speaking of alien eggs, Xtro is also one of a number of shows that takes some inspiration from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). The alien in Xtro impregnates a woman in a manner that echoes the method that the facehugger in Alien employs to deposit its embryo inside its chosen host. Xtro’s resultant gestation and birthing process is highly original in its execution, not to mention gory and unsettling. It certainly tops the Alien scene featuring John Hurt in the gross-out gore stakes.

Another film that Xtro appears to draw inspiration from is Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981). On one level both films are serious dramas that are concerned with the breakdown of an upper middle class marriage, the effect that it has on the family’s young son and the complications that arise thereafter. It just happens that extraterrestrial intervention is the cause of the marital strife in both cases. Both families live in anonymous apartment blocks and both films feature a highly effective and disorientating scene involving a strained interaction between a parent and their son’s teacher at their school’s gates. With its highly mannered, histrionic and alienating acting styles and affected dialogue, Possession’s content veers more knowingly towards that of the art house rather than popular cinema. But Bromley Davenport appears to briefly show that he can play at Zulawski’s game too during the evening dinner scene that takes place on Sam’s first night home. The conversation around the dinner table, and the acting styles that are employed to relay it, suddenly take on the texture and strange intensity of a typical scene from Possession, to great effect. Both films also feature an alien having sex with a human female and both films are pretty gory. Interestingly, Possession was rewarded with ‘section 2’ video nasty status while Xtro only made it as far as the ‘section 3’ list.

On reflection, I think it’s likely that close scrutiny would reveal that Xtro is actually a very clever postmodern love letter to a whole range of ‘aliens on Earth’ movies. For instance, as Sam loiters in a London street in his stolen suit, one lengthy shot shows him with his right hand tucked within his jacket’s chest flap, Napoleon-style. There’s no narrative reason for him to do this but he’s actually replicating the iconic pose that the alien-infected Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) adopts in Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) as he waits to escape from hospital. And when Sam starts to slowly revert back to his alien form there are a couple of shots where his plight brings Carroon’s own unfortunate transformation to mind.

All of this may make Xtro sound like a simple hodgepodge of ideas lifted from other films. Certainly there’s no denying that the show does follow the dictum of ‘repetition with difference’ that governs most genre films. However, Xtro is so much more than the above comparative analyses might suggest. Bromley Davenport and his team pull everything together with such incredible panache, and add so many original and at times jaw-dropping elements and ideas of their own creation, that the film becomes something positively unique and really quite special. As a more general point of reference I would liken Xtro to the films of Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren if only because – like Xtro – their films were unmistakably British yet thoroughly distinctive in terms of the gore and unpleasant scenarios that they featured when compared to most other British horror productions of the time. Their films remain startling and shocking to some extent as the wider received history of British horror films has only relatively recently begun to acknowledge that a small number of Britons did actually make the kind of films that could compete with the gory excesses of contemporaneous European and independent American horror filmmakers. Incidentally, Xtro does also appear to reference Warren’s own sci-fi film Prey (1977), in as much as the first thing that the aliens do in both movies after landing in the British countryside is attack and kill a courting couple in a car.

What distinguishes Xtro from the films of Walker and Warren is its obviously much bigger budget and the enhanced production values and technical aspects that New Line Cinema’s financial involvement brought to the project. The acting is pretty much topnotch as far as the main characters go and the two lead actors, Philip Sayer and Bernice Stegers, bring a sense of gravitas to the film. Some of the scenarios that they have to act out and some of the dialogue that they have to speak is that of generic sci-fi monster movies but they approach the material in a wholly serious, laudable and convincing way. There’s good supporting work from Danny Brainin and Maryam d’Abo too. Brainin’s American character is the film’s nominal hero figure and it’s interesting to note that the fact that Joe is Jewish crops up in one conversation that he has with Sam. Xtro was Maryam d’Abo’s first film. Her au pair Analise is French, which results in the actress adopting a kind of all-purpose Euro-something accent. She’s a pretty feisty character at times and it would be easy to assume that Bromley Davenport was looking to include a character in Xtro that riffed on Isabelle Adjani’s wild performance as Anna in Possession. However, Analise’s accent, her nude sex scenes and her general placement within the show’s narrative remind us more of the kind of characters that the marvellous Julie Ege used to play in early 1970s British horror films. Young Simon Nash performs well enough as the troubled Tony and he projects his telekinetic power trips in a suitably petulant and disturbing way.

British viewers steeped in local contemporaneous popular culture will also find some interesting personnel cast in minor roles here. As well as appearing in a handful of sex comedies and Jackie Collins adaptations, Susie Silvey was the go-to girl when British TV sitcoms, sketch shows and dramas needed a touch of glamour and/or sauciness. She was also a regular dancer on ‘Top of the Pops.’ In Xtro she gets impregnated by an alien and is centre stage for what is perhaps the most outrageous birthing scene ever to appear in a genre film. Anna Wing, who went on to play the matriarchal Lou Beale in the BBC TV soap ‘EastEnders’ (1985 – ongoing) is Rachel’s nosey neighbour in the apartment block. She has an unfortunate encounter with a life size, sentient and aggressive Action Man figure after she kills Tony’s pet snake. The Action Man is played by Sean ‘Tok’ Crawford, who was one half of the popular robotic dance-mime act Tik and Tok. His partner in that venture, Tim ‘Tik’ Dry plays the ‘back-to-front’ Xtro creature that scuttles around the British countryside on all fours early on in the show.

Xtro’s technical aspects are all very good. Cinematographer John Metcalfe had previously worked on Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols vehicle The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980) and a couple of Norman J. Warren films (including Warren’s Alien homage Inseminoid [1981]). Metcalfe employs some noticeably stylish camera angles here and he’s adept at using his camera to gently pick out important aspects of the show’s mise-en-scene without necessarily drawing attention to what he’s doing. There are also some interesting lighting strategies at work here. Every so often a key scene will be excessively bathed in a striking and strongly coloured light. The show’s special effects are mostly practical but they all work really well. Francis Coates’ creature effects work draws upon a well matched combination of rubber and slime that has a convincingly organic look about it. Harry Bromley Davenport wrote and performed the film’s synthesizer-led soundtrack score himself. Some of his more noodly passages sound like the random synth tracks that were used as background music in Jon Pertwee’s early ‘Doctor Who’ adventures, while his more structured pieces possess a symphonic Progressive Rock-like vibe. Both approaches support and enhance his visual work extremely well. Bromley Davenport once described Xtro as being a bit of a mess. I would disagree with that assessment and can only conclude that one man’s cinematic mess can be another man’s cinematic treasure.

Second Sight’s Region Free Blu-ray + CD of Xtro is sure to be warmly welcomed by the film’s existing fans. It should also prove to be something of a treat for those who are new to the show. Three versions of the film can be viewed via a series of seamless branching options: the original version that features an ending that was ultimately vetoed by Robert Shaye; the US cinema version that features a replacement ending and the UK VHS version (essentially the US cinema version minus some cuts and re-edits). These three versions all sport excellent picture and sound quality. Also present is a fourth iteration dubbed the 2018 Director’s version. For this version Harry Bromley Davenport saw fit to alter the film’s contrast and colour timing while also reframing some shots and revisiting some of the show’s special effects.

The disc’s extra features include the highly entertaining and informative Xploring Xtro (2018, 56 min.) which features interviews with director Harry Bromley Davenport, producer Mark Forstater, actors Bernice Stegers, Susie Silvey, Tim Dry, Sean Crawford and Robert Pereno, writer Alan Jones and BBFC examiner Craig Lapper. It’s a comprehensive feature that crams in lots of interesting details about the making of the film. Beyond Xtro (2018, 7 min.) has Bromley Davenport and Forstater talking about a planned fourth Xtro film, Xtro: The Big One, while showcasing an assortment of tasty test footage. Loving the Alien is a tribute to actor Philip Sayer. It features contributions from Bromley Davenport, Bernice Stegers and Dennis Atherton as well as the song ‘Just One Life’ that Queen’s Brian May wrote and dedicated to the actor. Xtro Xposed (2005, 11 min.) is an older featurette that has an animated Bromley Davenport wilfully trashing his own movie at nearly every turn. In the interview The World of Xtro (2018, 27 min.) super fan Dennis Atherton talks about his love for the film and the joy that the show’s many enigmas offer to the repeat viewer. He also provides evidence to support his argument that director Harry Bromley Davenport is bluffing when he claims that he wasn’t trying very hard when he made the movie. Atherton’s observations are by turn contested or supported by contributions from Bromley Davenport, Mark Forstater and Susie Silvey.

Note: This limited edition set comes in a hard card sleeve which also houses a CD of the show’s original soundtrack and a 42-page illustrated booklet. These extras were not supplied for review.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/xtro/feed/2https://trailersfromhell.com/xtro/Under Capricornhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/ufTwphzBElE/
https://trailersfromhell.com/under-capricorn/#commentsSat, 07 Jul 2018 17:28:11 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34270 What could go wrong? Alfred Hitchcock directs Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten in a mysterious tale of marital intrigues and social bigotry in a land populated by ex-convicts. Bergman is the long-suffering wife and Jack Cardiff is behind the Technicolor camera, which swoops through several amazing unbroken moving camera master shots, one fully five...

What could go wrong? Alfred Hitchcock directs Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten in a mysterious tale of marital intrigues and social bigotry in a land populated by ex-convicts. Bergman is the long-suffering wife and Jack Cardiff is behind the Technicolor camera, which swoops through several amazing unbroken moving camera master shots, one fully five minutes long. What could go wrong?

Under Capricorn is Alfred Hitchcock’s sophomore try with his own TransAtlantic pictures, after servitude to Selznick and before his ‘fifties masterpieces at Warner Brothers. This time around a very Selznick-y property draws his attention, yet another period drama about a disturbed wife haunted by past crimes and present intolerance. Ingrid Bergman is given an interesting period look treatment by Jack Cardiff’s painterly camera, but the picture has serious problems in the script and production departments. Hitchcock fans tend to dote on this UK-filmed show mainly for its elaborate camera work. One extended shot is over five minutes long, with scores of camera moves and positions. This time Hitchcock’s technique is almost invisible.

Hitchcock all but apologized to biographer François Truffaut for his production deficiencies on Capricorn, confessing that he was so proud to cast Ingrid Bergman that he neglected basic script issues. Back in 1831 (that’s five years before the fall of the Alamo) the penniless ‘black sheep’ Irishman Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) arrives in Sydney, the capital of the new territory of Australia. Charles ignores the advice of his uncle, the new colonial Governor (Cecil Parker) and associates openly with the social pariah Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten), an emancipated murderer who has since become a wealthy landowner. Flusky invites Charles to dinner in hopes that his good name will attract the local ladies that so far have snubbed his hospitality; Sam also has the notion that socializing might improve the condition of his wife Lady Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman). A sickly alcoholic, Henrietta is convinced that she’s put a curse on their marriage — Sam was convicted for the murder of her brother, and she fled her noble family to be with him here in New South Wales. Charles knew Henrietta years ago. His presence brightens her outlook, but other interests seem set on keeping Lady Flusky in her sickbed — namely the troublemaking housekeeper Milly (Margaret Leighton).

After the poor performance of his first TransAtlantic color production Rope, Hitchcock took a second dip into the semi-gothic romance territory he mastered in Selznick’s Rebecca. Under Capricorn is handsomely filmed, but its painfully klunky, overwritten script is an almost total loss. We’re given a stiff compilation of situations from Tess of the D’Urbervilles and especially Wuthering Heights, with its backstory of Henrietta’s elopment with the family groom back in Ireland. Audiences familiar with Mrs. Danvers surely had little patience with the tiresome Milly character, a resentful housekeeper openly plotting against her mistress. The four principal characters spend a full two hours distressed and unhappy. Sam’s suffering seems especially unnecessary — the real cause of his discontent is so obvious that the audience soon loses patience with the whole story. Hitchcock later said that it was a mistake to put his friend Hume Cronyn in charge of the adaptation. Is it fair to say that he sorely needed the assistance of a strong story editor like Alma Reville or Joan Harrison?

Ingrid Bergman is fine, but her conflicted character seldom smiles. Her Victorian garments and hairstyle certainly seem authentic, if less glamorous — the pale, quivering Henrietta begins in the neurotic state where her Paula Alquist finishes in George Cukor’s Gaslight. Henrietta already seems caught up in a nervous breakdown — for her initial entrance at a formal dinner, she arrives barefoot, jittery and clearly not well. For us filmgoers the problem is that it’s a one-note performance — Henrietta remains morose and distraught without letup. A subplot about Henrietta learning to supervise the kitchen help is dropped midway — we never learn which ex-convict crone made the winning breakfast. We also wonder why the crones in the kitchen don’t spill the beans about Milly’s cruel trickery.

After the first hour or so Henrietta’s suffering ceases to be interesting, especially when the schemes of Margaret Leighton’s jealous housemaid are so transparent. (spoiler, but not really:) At the finale Milly once again ‘gaslights’ Henrietta with a disappearing shrunken head, in the only scene anybody seems to remember from the picture. She also tries to poison Lady Flusky. Make up your mind Milly, do you want your mistress dead, or just crazy?

We’re told that English film critics were not pleased to see the admired Ms. Leighton, an accomplished stage actress, forced to play such an annoying character. Fifteen years later, Leighton married actor Michael Wilding; she’s unforgettable in John Ford’s final feature 7 Women.

Joseph Cotten is woefully miscast. His Sam Flusky is meant to be wholly devoted to Henrietta yet also maliciously jealous of her, a contradiction that doesn’t play. We never get an idea of what Flusky suffered as an emancipated convict. He simmers with resentment. He seems a moron to be so fooled by Milly’s nasty manipulations. As he was raised as a humble groom, a better screenplay might have better explained his incompetent manners and methods, perhaps making him more sympathetic. Flusky instead just lumbers about, nursing evil thoughts about his peers and growing more jealous of Adare’s attentions to his wife.

The local gentry feign tolerance yet snub Sam socially; his dinner guests want his patronage yet lie to his face to cover their wives’ bad manners. Flusky’s barging into the Governor’s Irish Ball is a fatal faux-pas that spoils all Adare has done for Henrietta. What should be the ‘big scene’ falls flat because Flusky really hasn’t anything to say once he arrives. The moment draws comparison with Burl Ives’ invasion of a ranch party in The Big Country, or even better, Tom Courtenay’s foray into a fancy Tsarist eatery to retrieve Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago. Hitchcock’s best films are loaded with scenes even more dynamic than those, but Capricorn hasn’t a one.

Looking just like Eustace Tilley, the top-hatted cartoon dandy of The New Yorker magazine, Michael Wilding takes on the task of rekindling Henrietta’s interest in life. Charles Adare is handsome, witty, authentic-looking — and deadly dull. His motives are also suspect: he’s lacking in the personal ambition department, and seems perfectly happy to break up Henrietta’s marriage. A gothic thriller needs romantic sparks to energize a love triangle, but the bloodless Wilding is simply not in Bergman’s class. He had been in Brit films for sixteen years and is often described as dashing, but here he comes across as a bore. Was he ever an effective romantic lead? Michael Wilding likewise makes no impact in his second Hitchcock picture, Stage Fright. The only role I’ve seen the actor really nail is his idealistic Egyptian pharaoh — Wilding’s blissfully blank expressions are perfect for a noble inspired by a new religion.

Frankly, Australia doesn’t feel like an inviting place. Henrietta and Sam are prisoners in a social order that forever relegates former criminals to ‘unclean’ status. A poor relation of a politician can’t defy his benefactors without paying a price, and an uppity servant will be hammered back to her station without mercy. Cecil Parker’s thick-headed Governor is bowled over by Henrietta at a party, yet soon thereafter tries to indict her for a ten-year-old killing in another country, a crime already paid for by her husband. We’re ready for the show to be resolved like Bergman’s Gaslight, where the wife recovers and runs away with the man of her choosing, giving the representatives of snobbery a piece of her mind as she exits. Capricorn’s conclusion may be logical but it remains unsatisfactory.

Hitchcock’s direction shows he wasn’t quite finished with his Rope experiment, improving on his idea of filming entire scenes in unbroken master shots that prowl from room to room. The action here is more interesting than the earlier film’s pushy, self-conscious camera, mainly because Rope didn’t try to disguise its theatrical, artificial nature. In Capricorn Jack Cardiff’s camera glides and cranes smoothly as it follows Adare, even as the man climbs up the outside of the Flusky mansion to break into Henrietta’s room. Cardiff’s autobio explains that the enormous blimped Technicolor camera was so unwieldy that they called it ‘the tank.’ When it moves through three rooms in one five-minute take, stagehands had to move and then reassemble the set as it progressed — rushing wild walls into position before they were caught in the view of the moving camera. That accounts for the candle-holders that are still vibrating as the camera re-enters the dining room. Cardiff reported that tempers run thin while trying to master this technical steeplechase. Hitchcock’s toe was broken when it was run over by the camera dolly.

For all that effort the film feels inert. We never seem to get outdoors. People talk about riding horses, but the horse accident that figures strongly in the plot happens off-screen (and makes Charles Adare seem even more of a dolt). Almost every scene is bracketed by a matte painting of Sydney Harbor or the Flusky manse at various times of day or night. None of them are particularly convincing. One painted view of the house uses a camera move on multi-plane art to achieve a depth effect. In another, a puppet horse’s head and leg add a bit of needed motion.

But we’re never more than a dissolve away from long pages of dialogue, much of which seems unnecessary. After we’ve witnessed Milly’s scheming first-hand for a full hour, the characters proceed to explain it all back to the audience one more time. Alfred Hitchcock was later teased for forcing his show-off ‘Hitchcock moments’ into pictures, and for constructing some movies as stacks of these sometimes-forced moments. After flops like Under Capricorn Hitchcock likely took a keen interest in seeing that every scene had something of immediate audience interest, and returned to stories that could be told as much as possible with his camera.

There’s no reason Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t stray from his ‘Master of Suspense’ line of thrillers, although he never seemed quite the man to succeed with costume dramas. Jamaica Inn has its grace notes — it’s complex, funny and clever. The only moment that stands out in Capricorn is the hoary device of the shrunken head, the one so nicely quoted in Riccardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. The ‘haunted’ head now plays like an attempt to jazz up the proceedings and provide an intriguing still for the ad campaign.

Touted as a 4K restoration, the KL Studio ClassicsBlu-ray of Under Capricorn is the best I’ve seen this show, and a pleasure to watch compared to older disc releases. But it’s far from perfect. CBS is listed as the rights holder; Hitchcock says that when the movie failed, it was reclaimed by the bank. If the film materials to do so still exist, CBS could have spent a lot of money re-compositing the Technicolor film. The more likely scenario is that an existing Eastmancolor composite negative was given a 4K scan, and digital tools were used to maximize the color, sharpness and contrast. Digital enhancement might also have minimized color fringing where the three color elements did not align.

We immediately wonder if the picture isn’t too bright overall. The Warners logo fades up, passing a point of good ‘exposure’ before settling on a washed-out level of brightness. Color fringing is not strongly apparent, but some contrasty objects carry faint color ‘halos.’ Most interiors seem very high-key, and few images show the kind of image sensitivity we associate with Jack Cardiff. He was fresh from his string of Powell-Pressburger classics, some of the most accomplished color films ever made. Bergman looks good, of course, but the color is more than a tad forced.

Then again, this is the first time I’ve seen this movie where it looked good enough that I wanted to watch it all the way through.

Not helping is the Richard Addinsell music score, which persists in backing intimate conversation scenes with fully-orchestrated and inappropriately busy music. By the time we get to the Irish Ball, the romantic waltzes just seem more of the same background racket. Is this evidence of how inattentive Hitchcock could be when he lost faith in a production?

Kino assembles good key extras. Kat Ellinger assesses the film from an academic, feminist viewpoint, adding choice opinions about Bergman and gothic romance clichés. We also get the full audio tape of the Hitchcock/Truffaut chat session that addresses Under Capricorn. From featurette producer Robert Fischer comes a lengthy Claude Chabrol interview on Hitchcock, much of which discusses the clash of opinions back at Cahiers du Cinema. Flaws in the Auteur Theory became obvious when the magazine unaccountably voted Capricorn one of the ten best films of all time.

Kino’s welcome English subs are marred by quite a few typos, even changing Joseph Cotten’s name from Flusky to ‘Klusky.’ A trailer is present that collects the movie’s every potentially interesting image. Ads exist for a reissue that hypes the shrunken head to sell the picture as a horror thriller. Is Ingrid Bergman really “A Woman Driven by the Demons of Hell!” Maybe we agree — the show needed to invent a shower scene for Margaret Leighton’s Milly, interrupted by the entrance of Henrietta Flusky’s silhouette, brandishing a carving knife.

Inflato-faced Jô Shishido is at it again, here in a typically precocious, spoofy crime adventure by Japan’s playful Seijun Suzuki. If the eccentric color scheme doesn’t do the trick, the antic comic relief and wild musical numbers will. Shishido dances the Charleston, and the nightclub rocks with a terrific twist number. The music under Nikkatsu’s logo is more progressive than that in a Hollywood picture of 1963.

One can always count on Seijun Suzuki for something different, and even in this early ’60s Nikkatsu crime thriller the emphasis is on sheer genre fun. Tony Rayns identifies the genre style addressed here as ‘borderless action,’ which basically indicates a semi-realistic crime thriller that doesn’t take itself too seriously. As always the Japanese genre filmmakers have copied American trends so well, that they end up anticipating us. Thus the action in Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! has the outlandish, slightly comic-book flavor of James Bond pictures. Sober yakuza sagas step aside, for this action hybrid plays fast and loose. For my money Seijun Suzuki’s brand is really his visual stylization, which we’re told hit its peak a few years later with the more idiosyncratic Branded to Kill. By then Suzuki’s experimental style was making him unpopular with the Nikkatsu brass. This earlier show has fewer pretensions — plus goofy comic relief.

Hotshot private dick Hideo Tajima (Jô Shishido) runs his own office, where his loyal assistants continually cook up shady shakedown scams. Hideo gambles when not buzzing around town in his spiffy white roadster, and borrows money from his showgirl-pal Sally (Naomi Hoshi). But he also amuses himself by performing tough undercover work for Inspector Kumagai (Nobuo Kaneko). Yakuza gangs are stealing U.S. Army weapons, and Hideo thinks he can infiltrate the gang responsible by befriending Manabe (Tamio Kawaji), a sharp- dressing young member of the gang. Hideo goes through the usual ritual of proofs and suspicions, with both Sally and a priest helping to back up his phony identity. He also falls in love with Chiako (Reiko Sassamori), the gang boss’s moll, who proves to be a virgin innocent orphaned by the boss. Just as Hideo learns the identity of the ‘Mr. Big’ behind the arms racket, he’s discovered and set up for murder. But like everything else, he takes it in stride.

Since the plot synopsis sounds like every cheap gangster picture ever made, take it under advisement that the graces of Go to Hell Bastards! lie elsewhere, mainly in the inventive, genre-wise fun elements added by the creative director. Truckloads of yakuza punks waving weapons picket the police station, waiting for their chance to kill the witness Manabe, and the Inspector says he can’t arrest them. The evil smugglers bribe a black U.S. soldier to sneak out the guns. Wild free-for all gunfights break out in the street when a rival gang tries to horn in, crashing the motorcade with a Pepsi Cola truck. In proven detective fashion, our hero Hideo soft-talks his showgirl Sally into anything he needs, including risking her life. He also tries to rape the innocent leading lady, apologizing only when she tells him the sob story of her life. Topping that off, Hideo’s diminutive female office assistant always has a cynical remark ready, as when live TV coverage of a yakuza riot is interrupted by a meddlesome commercial break.

Our hero Hideo is none other than Jô (or ‘Joe’) Shishido, Japan’s strangest action star. By now I’ve heard at least three explanations for his bizarre act of self mutilation to ‘enhance’ his appearance — Shishido is the star that shot collagen into his cheeks to change the shape of his face. I’ve never heard anybody say that this makes him more handsome, but it sure as Jigoku makes him distinctive. Is this how a Japanese might try to morph himself into the likeness of Bobby Darin? Shishido looks more like a chipmunk, or someone who just had four wisdom teeth pulled. Or maybe that breath mint he just popped in his mouth was really a firecracker sent by Wile E. Coyote. The possibilites are endless. Yes, the photo just above is an exaggeration — hey, it’s the Nikkatsuscope Mumps!

Even in his silk suit Shishido is fast on his feet. Hideo is more of a sneak than a fighter, but he does pull some fancy sleight of hand when fooling the crime boss. The fun is in the trimmings, which are way-cool for 1963. The principal nightclub puts on conventional girlie-show performances, but Sally also croons a couple of songs, the lyrics of which directly relate to the crime intrigues presently in play. When Hideo shows up with his new gang cronies, he joins her in singing and dancing a Charleston, slipping her the money he owes her and tipping her off that he’s working incognito. Shishido’s voice is weak and he’s a klutz on his feet, but that’s not the point.

When Sally comes out in a bright sweater to dance the twist, Go to Hell Bastards! shows more class than most U.S. films that tried to affect a ‘wild and shakin” dance vibe in 1963 — think of all those Beach Party pictures that are now major embarrassments. Harume Ibe’s rock music score lays down a bouncy beat, from the title sequence forward. For the mass yakuza shootout scene slow jazz plays, striking an ironic, almost humorous contrast. Some Japanese attempts at humor seem terribly broad, but the movie stylistics of various rebel directors are way ahead of the game. Find me an American comic crime film from 1963 or so that isn’t totally square… Robin and the 7 Hoods?

Director Suzuki doesn’t ‘cross borders’ into forbidden sex or violence as Nikkatsu would do a few years later, when it tried to energize a failing movie audience. He instead brings in unexpected bits of musical fun and knockabout comedy. Hideo’s dopey assistants don’t hurt the film, but instead help us understand that we’re watching is not to be taken too seriously. Are some laughs intentional? A phone rings in a room packed with yakuza punks, resting with their weapons. The polite kid that answers says,“Hello, Sakura clan here!”

Seizuki’s play with Yankee pop music is exceeded only by his formal visual style. He plays with the color scheme as if obsessed with the design fetishes of Vincente Minnelli. Most locales, even what look to be real exteriors, have been painted in dull, drab colors, mostly gray — but somewhere in the shot is always a blast of red. Even random scenes will have a red accent, somewhere. Hideo wears a red tie in a silvery suit. The office for the 2-3 bureau is mostly gray, except for a red calendar near the door. There’s no aesthetic for this beyond signifying that what we’re seeing is not real — it’s as if a comic book could only afford one color, red. The bluish-gray nightclub has some accents, mostly the bright colors worn by Sally. She even appears for one song in a Cyd Charisse- like crimson dress. On the other hand, the ‘good girl’ Chiako’s outfits stick with the drab color format assigned to walls and floors. Does her lack of bright color signify her status as a virgin?

Hideo finds himself in a conflagration in the gang’s basement contraband warehouse. He shoots his way out with one of those ’60s Japanese movie machine gun props that’s far too large; I think it was made big to accommodate a Roman candle to simulate gunfire. Apparently, Japanese gun laws were even tougher back then. The gangs of yakuza killers routinely brandish swords and rifles while careering around in flatbed trucks; at one point the circle a fountain, as in a Jacques Tati picture.

The cheerful ending sees Hideo walking away from a yakuza battle that must entail a hundred combatants — ah, he’s done his job, the cops will take over from here. The rockin’ finish sees him tooling away in his roadster with his new girlfriend, in what is either a very hazy, or very smoggy Tokyo. We see the giant globe atop the department store, that features in Sam Fuller’s House of Bamboo eight years before!

What make of car is Hideo’s slick white roadster? Is it Japanese? I want one.

Arrow Video USA’s Blu-ray of Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! is a sharp and peppy transfer of a film in great shape. In many older DVDs of Japanese genre pictures the color looks greenish and the grain is a little rough; the color and texture here are a major improvement. Nikkatsu did the transfer, according to Arrow.

The main course extra is a half-hour interview with Japanese film expert Tony Rayns, who seems quite amused by Go to Hell Bastards! even if the film’s comic relief leaves him cold. There’s a lot of lore to be dispensed about Jô Shishido, Nikkatsu and the tangle of hybrid genre films pouring out of Japanese studios, at a time when that country was making more movies than any other, even the U.S.A.. Un-billed online is a good, informative insert booklet essay by Jasper Sharp. My education in arcane international crime pix proceeds apace. I can’t wait to spring the word mokukokuseki on somebody. But who?

Also present is a stills gallery and an original trailer; the cover art reverses to opt for an original Japanese poster design. In this case the commissioned new art by Matthew Griffin is quite good. And who can resist a disc cover that says ‘go to hell bastards!’? It’s the kind of thing you want to ‘accidentally’ leave on the coffee table when unwanted guests show up, to send a message.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/detective-bureau-2-3-go-to-hell-bastards/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/detective-bureau-2-3-go-to-hell-bastards/Hitler’s Hollywoodhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/l9sdEAUdFPo/
https://trailersfromhell.com/hitlers-hollywood/#commentsTue, 03 Jul 2018 19:53:32 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34251 What, another docu about Nazis? Rüdiger Suchsland’s show tells the entire story — with many rare clips and interesting actor and filmmaker profiles — of the hundreds of state-produced German films made during the Third Reich. It’s the most thorough, informative and eye-opening show on the subject I’ve yet seen. It comes with revelations...

What, another docu about Nazis? Rüdiger Suchsland’s show tells the entire story — with many rare clips and interesting actor and filmmaker profiles — of the hundreds of state-produced German films made during the Third Reich. It’s the most thorough, informative and eye-opening show on the subject I’ve yet seen. It comes with revelations about some surprising names, like Douglas Sirk and Ingrid Bergman.

When I reviewed Zeitgeist/Kino’s Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy Of Nazi Film a few weeks back, a reader told me of an even better documentary by the same filmmaker, Rüdiger Suchsland. Forbidden concentrated on viewer reactions to the movies of the Third Reich, whereas this full docu tells the story from beginning to end, in detail that will impress knowledgeable film historians. I found good samples of films I’ve only read about, and was introduced to impressive actors I’d never heard of before. The scary message of Hitler’s Hollywood is that the Nazis’ movies aren’t all obvious ugly propaganda, no more than spirited advocacy films from any other country. The narration script, written by Suchsland, would make a good book in print. The show presents scores of relevant titles, names and faces, but also puts forward a compelling interpretation of what we’re seeing. The first lesson we learn is that Josef Goebbels’ Nazi pictures didn’t attack the audience, but instead put forward a natural, seductive line of reasoning.

Goebbels seized control of all German media and public communication almost from the beginning, and of course only Nazi ideals prevailed. But the main aim of the films was to entertain. After the Jews and liberals were expelled or chose to flee, those artists that remained strove to make pictures Germans wanted to see. A few years into Nazi rule, all private companies were consolidated into the single entity Ufa GmbH, and Goebbels personally approved everything. (Recommended viewing: The Goebbels Experiment) Musicals, adventures and comedies prevailed. The show opens on clips from a picture about two confidence men that impersonate Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The detective heroes sing as they enjoy a bath in a fancy hotel room. When Agfacolor came in, audiences were treated to lavish musical entertainments with scantily-clad dancers.

The question of Nazi propaganda is always present. The blatant example given is Hitler Youth Quex, which seems a direct response to the short-lived pre-Reich communist picture Kuhle Wampe: Or, Who Owns the World? Young boy Quex rejects the licentious socialist youth but is inspired by the order, rituals and quest for political perfection demonstrated by the Hitler Youth. Quex’s father, a socialist lout, is superseded by a Nazi youth counselor.

Virulent anti-Semitism becomes a major theme as the state takes steps to persecute Jews. Pictures are made depicting Jewish perfidy through history, including one about a Jewish cad that tricks good Germans to extort a personal fortune. He then forces the heroine to submit to him sexually by torturing her boyfriend. The docu stresses that most pictures didn’t have overt messages, and instead simply presented a consensus approval of conformity to a single value system. One romantic drama starring Swedish import Ingrid Bergman, is about some women that try to start their own business. By the last reel, they ‘learn’ that their place is in the home, having children. I had no awareness of this film, which doesn’t appear in the Bergman bios I’ve read or seen. 1941’s I Accuse (Ich klage an) is a courtroom drama about a doctor whose wife has a terminal disease, and commits a moral mercy killing. By extension the pro-euthanasia theme is applied to cripples, the sickly and mentally impaired. The narration notes that the film immediately preceded the Nazis’ widespread use of targeted euthanasia. The timing of the most virulent anti-Semitic films also immediately precedes changes in state policy.

Identically to the Russians and East Germans, Nazi films almost always prioritize communal action and subservience to the state over personal concerns. We see one example of a fine film shelved because its characters act too independently. In the average Nazi picture, happy housewives, workers, businessmen and soldiers have few selfish desires. They express the clear motivation to do their best for the Führer and Germany as a whole. If doubts arise, they are always resolved by picture’s end. Thus Hitler’s Hollywood proposes that the films share a single theme of unsullied cheer and optimism. There is only one communal character of a positive, hopeful citizen doing his duty. It’s a sinister expression of political mind control, as if human nature wants us not to be individuals, but anonymous units in a mass. The montages of faces that we see gazing with wonder upon the arrival of Hitler in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will make perfect sense.

We see various newsreels, especially around the Olympic Games, and when the war begins. We’re told that Goebbels pitched many of his films at the female audience. One happy romance filmed in wartime shows a couple meeting several years earlier at the Olympics, recalling happy times. In another domestic drama, a wife that once complained when her cameraman husband went on long work trips, now preaches that since there’s a war on, he has a good reason to be away from home. Wartime films stray from contemporary events to historical themes, obviously to provide moviegoers with escapist entertainment. Elaborate fantasies like Baron Münchausen were popular, with its magical adventurer and screen-ful of nude harem women.

A period drama about the Boer War demonizes the British in South Africa, and has the gall to set scenes with Germans suffering in concentration camps. The impressive Ufa version of Titanic blames the disaster on British and American capitalist greed an corruption. Because Allied bombings had begun, Goebbels decided to show Titanic only in occupied territories. Near the end, with the Reich collapsing on all sides, Ufa unaccountably made Kolberg, using a hundred thousand troops as extras (!). The story of a city fighting to the death against Napoleon can only be explained as a call for a Twilight of the Gods if the Reich falls. But the documentary stresses that even the average escapist Nazi film is part of the same social Death Pact — ‘Germany First’ pits the Homeland against all.

Many famous German actors and directors fled to France and America, but the docu takes a longer look at those that stayed. Not too many Nazi stars were punished afterwards by the West, unless they were full collaborators. Director Veit Harlan was the creative force behind the nastiest Nazi films condemning Jews, etc. He married actress Kristina Söderbaum and featured her in most of his pictures. Sort of a Sandra Dee type, Söderbaum plays the Aryan victim of the evil rapist in her husband’s Jud Süß.

Hans Albers is the ubiquitous good-humored hero in everything from Baron Münchausen to the anti-British science fiction picture Gold, made in 1934 but already claiming that Germany was the victim of unfair economic ‘warfare’ by English business tycoons. The glamorous Swede import Zarah Leander starred as a singing, suffering heroine in grandiose love melodramas. We see clips from her features directed by Hans Detlef Sierck, who made Nazi pictures for several years until literally escaping to the West. When he reached the U.S. his name became Douglas Sirk. He and his wife bided their time on a chicken ranch until the unexpected hit, the anti-Nazi Hitler’s Madman put him back in the running. Weirdly, Sirk’s fifties melodramas for Universal that focus on kitschy transcendent love and faith, use some of the same dramatic and cinematic devices seen in his sometimes politically-inflected Nazi films.

One actor shown but not mentioned by name is O.E. Hasse, in a jingoistic combat movie called Stukas (1941). We know Hasse well from his villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess. What was the clearing method for actors that featured in Nazi films? Billy Wilder made jokes about his duty ‘cleansing’ theaters in the Allied Sector, but gave few details. I assume that those taken by the Russians may have had more serious difficulties. Hasse features in George Seaton’s The Big Lift (1948) and Anatole Litvak’s Decision Before Dawn in 1951, so he clearly found his way around his past in Goebbels’ pictures.

The docu stresses the high technical standards of German filmmaking and notes the film’s penchant for montage sequences and other cinematic effects that use superimpositions and complex dissolves. Director Suchland shows how these myth-making devices are used — in a montage of death scenes enhanced with spiritual glows and waves of light. In Nazi films every sacrifice and quest is elevated to glorious heights, to beautify the social Death Pact.

Director Suchsland also touches on films and personalities that went against the grain. One very prestigious actor-director inserted ‘questionable’ lyrics into a musical scene. Others made films (sometimes in Fascist Italy) that didn’t tow the Nazi party line. Hans Albers is a lovesick sailor in the melancholy Große Freiheit Nr. 7, which uses impressive orchestrations of the romantic song La Paloma. We see excellent color clips from movies starring the Dutch actress and singer Ilse Werner, whose romantic problems have no relation to being a good citizen in the Nazi Order. The commentary describes Werner as the one Nazi actress that could have made it in Hollywood.

Kino Lorber’s DVD of Hitler’s Hollywood looks very good for a Standard Def release, with almost all of the clips in excellent condition. The show uses effective graphics but does not depend on them — we’re far too interested in the content to want fancy embellishments.

The voiceover script explains the fascinating historical context. When Rüdiger Suchsland finds a filmic trend that resonates with the history of the Reich, he shows the evidence without too much of the social psychology theories we get from Siegfried Kracauer. He also doesn’t try to overload the docu with ‘star’ input — for instance, rather than stress the impact of the giant personality Marlene Dietrich, he simply states that when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to return from Hollywood, Goebbels reacted by demonizing her in the German press. The lies stuck so well that even after the war, Marlene was no longer popular in her home country.

The disc carries audio tracks in both German and English. Actor Udo Kier is the only voice talent credite, but I’m not sure that he does both tracks. The English track is a bit slow and tentative and the German more fluid. The English track comes with subtitles that only translate German dialogue, so I recommend the subs that accompany the German track — as more is said, at a faster pace, on that track. The audio is fine, especially in the clips from German musicals. Some of the singers are quite good but nobody dances as well as, say, our Eleanor Powell. One statuesque dancing star mainly spins around a lot, albeit sometimes in very revealing dresses.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/hitlers-hollywood/feed/4https://trailersfromhell.com/hitlers-hollywood/Beiruthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/P5uTvcT77lA/
https://trailersfromhell.com/beirut/#respondTue, 03 Jul 2018 19:45:00 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34250 We’re still waiting for the role that will prove that Jon Hamm has a future after Mad Men. This middling hostage negotiation drama doesn’t insult our intelligence yet is still not that much more impressive than an average ‘let’s go to a war zone!’ episode of NCIS. Rosamund Pike plays an intrepid diplomat/agent who...

We’re still waiting for the role that will prove that Jon Hamm has a future after Mad Men. This middling hostage negotiation drama doesn’t insult our intelligence yet is still not that much more impressive than an average ‘let’s go to a war zone!’ episode of NCIS. Rosamund Pike plays an intrepid diplomat/agent who chooses to go rogue with Hamm’s character because (surprise) the system is so corrupt.

Back in 1981 United Artists briefly distributed an amazing French- produced movie by Volker Schlöndorff called Circle of Deceit. For my money it got the story of warfare in Lebanon exactly right, before most Americans had thought much about how upsets in the Middle East might affect the world at large. The ugly conflict is fed by media attention: Bruno Ganz’s reporter finds that massacres are being staged so photographers can supply horrific images for readers of German and French magazines to deplore. Even though the show is about Germans caught up in the Lebanese civil war, the focus is on the right thing, a political catastrophe. It’s a fine picture that ought to be better known.

This last week was released a sequel to the first Sicario movie, continuing the impressive tale of total lawless anarchy on the Texas border. It will of course depend on action movie grit to bring in audiences, but I have to say that its claim that nobody is in charge of anything in the War on Drugs is quite credible: ‘Beirut’ is beginning to happen all around us, even if our biggest threat is homegrown radicalism. The amusing thing about the Sicario movies is that their ‘personal revenge’ connection isn’t an embarrassment. Benicio Del Toro’s implacable hit man places himself beyond emotion in his quest for blood retribution. That appears to be the highest ideal in American film fiction these days. Happily, in the next multiplex movie-box, the MisterRogers docu might be playing too.

But most movies about unpleasant things that happen to ‘other people overseas’ are more like Bleeker Street’s Beirut, from the capable filmmakers Brad Anderson and Tony Gilroy. A handsome white guy must deal with trouble in a foreign hot spot AND a traumatic past event. But he’ll return to save a friend and perhaps find a kernel of good amid the tragedy. At his side is a attractive woman, whose purpose is to enable noble white heroes to overcome their doubts.

The best thing about Beirut (working title High Wire Act; UK title The Negotiator) is that our hero is not a killer with a gun. In a prologue from 1972, American diplomat Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm) is doing his best to keep the peace in Lebanon when various security agents including Israelis insist that he surrender his adopted son Karim, because Karim’s older brother is one of the Palestinians behind the Olympics Massacre (as chronicled in Spielberg’s Munich.) But the brother Rami (Ben Affan) attacks, kidnaps Karim and kills Mason’s wife Nadia (Leïla Bekhti).

Ten years later Mason is a conflict negotiator in labor disputes, and an alcoholic. He’s cajoled/tricked into returning to Lebanon to make an address at the University, but a cabal of intelligence spooks really needs him because his old buddy Cal (Mark Pellegrino) has been kidnapped. The kidnappers have demanded that Mason do the negotiating. It is 1982 and Beirut is now a ruined shell riddled with militias, snipers and random killings. Mason connects with Cal’s wife Alice (Kate Fleetwood) but finds the only person he can trust is Sandy Crowder (Rosamund Pike), a mid-level intelligence functionary. He soon begins to believe that there’s something fishy happening among the ‘good guys,’ whose priorities are mostly political. The Israelis appear to be looking for excuses to invade Lebanon.

Of course, the center of the story is Mason Skiles’ relationship to the kidnapper, who he knows personally. A rather well-organized string of setbacks, detours and perceived treacheries eventually lead Mason and the attractive Sandy to go extra-legal and act independently. Sandy even steals millions of dollars from the Embassy vault, after their cynical superiors find it expedient to write Cal off the books. And we get several scenes in which Jon Hamm’s Mason gets to shine, using well-honed negotiating tools to manipulate the kidnappers — stalling, bluffing, and fronting extreme shows of sincerity.

Beirut goes so far as to include Israel among the ruthless factions that routinely commit evil acts in the name of national security. To the film’s credit, this attitude is more than a simplistic ‘a pox on all their houses’ cynicism. But the format still makes us think of the average TV crisis drama show, where Arabs can be divided into evil villains, tragically decent villains, and women and children victims (or villains). The focus is of course on the Anglos on our side. With the exception of the actress playing Mason’s unfortunate spouse, the first ethnic name in the billing list comes up in position #11.

Unfortunately, the only non- Mad Men Jon Hamm appearances I can remember seeing are forgettable functionary roles in the awful Keanu Barata Nikto and Ben Affleck’s The Town. Beirut gives him bushy sideburns for the 1972 flashback, and then outfits him with sallow cheeks and a hangover stubble to wear through the rest of the movie. The talented Hamm does nothing wrong. It’s just that the script’s device of having him regret/resolve the killing of his wife is just too much of a cliché. Liam Neeson has made this same plot device his life’s work. It seemed overdone sixty years ago, when both Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck came out with westerns about white guys avenging the killings of their ethnic wives: Last Train from Gun Hill and The Bravados. Has avenging a heinous wrong done a family member become the only thing that will motivate a story? At Cannon we called the phenomenon TTIP: This Time It’s Personal.

And how many times has a multi-faction spy showdown ended up with the most ruthless, cagey players being Israel’s Mossad? Way back in the Harry Palmer tale Funeral in Berlin Israel ruled the roost for moral righteousness. Beirut’s relatively happy finale (key baddies dead or demoted, key goodies alive and promoted) still boils down to a comfortable fantasy.

The impressive production makes us wonder if the civic authorities in Morocco have preserved big sections of ruins as a permanent, ‘shoot Middle East movies here’ filming site. The direction is quite polished and the production more than adequate. Explosions and gun battles are not hyped, and we do get the sense that anybody can be killed at any time. Jon Hamm’s version of Martin Sheen’s “Saigon – sh**!” moment from Apocalypse Now comes when he wakes up in a Beirut hotel room and we see that an artillery hit has knocked out a couple of rooms right next to his own. Beirut can’t touch Circle of Deceit for the feeling of being in a war zone in 1980 — even reporters dared not to leave their hotels.

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment/Bleeker Street’s Blu-ray + DVD + Digital of Beirut is an attractive, polished encoding of a picture shot on film and finished on video. Tech specs are right up there. The cinematography does have a tendency to make everything seem ‘pretty,’ which is surely a necessity for commercial films at this level. The music track incorporates flavorful Middle Eastern themes, but we hear too much music overall. The constant use of music covers the drama like carpeting, pulling us out of the carefully assembled illusion of reality.

The extras are two promotional featurettes that position Beirut as a thoughtful and serious picture, which it mostly is.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/beirut/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/beirut/The Triumph of the Swillhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/4fSUt2QDGGE/
https://trailersfromhell.com/the-triumph-of-the-swill/#commentsMon, 02 Jul 2018 04:00:23 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34231To celebrate the Independence Day holiday, for the entire week we’re presenting what may be The Ultimate Trailer From Hell! It’s a transmission from an alternative facts universe. Keep telling yourself, It’s Only A Movie. It’s Only A Movie. Isn’t it? With thanks to Valerie Breiman and Mitch Watson. Josh’s sartorial T shirt can be ordered here

]]>To celebrate the Independence Day holiday, for the entire week we’re presenting what may be The Ultimate Trailer From Hell! It’s a transmission from an alternative facts universe. Keep telling yourself, It’s Only A Movie. It’s Only A Movie. Isn’t it?

Dietrich & von Sternberg in Hollywood assembles a package we’ve long desired, a quality set of the duo’s highly artistic Paramount pictures from the first half of the 1930s. The Scarlet Empress arrived in a sub-par Criterion disc early in 2001, and three more Dietrich titles were included in a Universal ‘glamour collection’ in 2006. A later TCM Vault double bill contained the other two. The quality of these DVDs was mostly okay, with the reservation that DVD’s limited resolving power did no favors to Josef von Sternberg’s fine images. The visual spell woven for Marlene Dietrich made heavy use of fog, mist, smoke, and diffusion filters, a look that DVD tends to turn to mush. Blu-ray helps these killer visuals look more like the glossy glamour stills for these movies, the ones that Josef von Sternberg personally shot to protect ‘the franchise.’

Marlene Dietrich often explained that her glamorous von Sternberg image was an artificial construct, one of several performing personae she invented through her career. The director may have chosen her to play Lola-Lola in der blaue engel because she could give the slightly plump appearance of a beer hall entertainer, but from that point forward she was refashioned into a svelte goddess. Billy Wilder described Marlene as a hausfrau who was most happy cooking for friends and movie crews, so that’s clearly one part of her personality. According to many personal accounts, she was a warm personality beloved by her film crews. Of the many performers that went overseas to entertain troops, she was one of the most generous and beloved. Soldiers on both sides of the European conflict associated Dietrich with the song Lili Marlene.

This set begins with her American debut, after a big publicity buildup. We also see a picture or two that weren’t well received, when she was declared box-office poison along with Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford. Marlene would later bounce back by reinventing herself in a more humorous guise.

Paramount gave Dietrich the big build-up in Morocco to offer her as their answer to MGM’s Greta Garbo. Hollywood had been selling the supposed allure of European sirens from almost the beginning of the studio system, a game that even Josef von Sternberg knew how to play: the ‘von’ was a mild affectation.

Hard-luck French entertainer Amy Jolly ends up in Mogador, Morocco performing a provocative act in the shabby nightclub of Lo Tinto (Paul Porcasi). She falls in love with Legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper), a footloose and unpredictable womanizer who at first has no use for her independent airs. Wealthy artist Monsieur La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou) falls head over heels for Amy. She tries to take La Bessiere’s proposal of marriage seriously, as he loves her and represents the security she needs. But Amy discovers that her heart is directed by deeper female instincts.

Dietrich’s English skills improved quickly; she had made an English-language version of The Blue Angel that wasn’t released here until after Morocco. American audiences saw a more sophisticated Marlene playing against top Paramount stars. To serve notice that something new is on the scene, for her first song Amy Jolly appears in a man’s tuxedo. She prowls through the audience ignoring the men, and finally gives actress Eve Southern a big kiss full on the mouth. These were of course our pre-Code years. America was intrigued by permissive attitudes toward sex in Berlin, and the moment was surely confected to make people talk. it’s pretty risqué stuff for 1930.

Von Sternberg was one of the top American ‘art’ directors, having begun with a gritty drama of down-and-outs in San Pedro called The Salvation Hunters. By the time of Morocco he’d refined his visuals into a mode even more gauzy than Paramount’s low-contrast, high-glamour style — the images are sometimes so hazy as to be focus- challenged. Morocco is less kinetic but also less mannered than some of his later work, although 1930 viewers found his sultry, static atmosphere to be irresistible.

Audiences took immediately to Dietrich’s style: quiet and reserved around strangers in public but secure in her independent sexuality. Her first leading men marveled at her beauty while trying to figure her out. Dietrich’s Amy Jolly is the first in a long line of Dietrich women with dark pasts, forever falling in love. The cool exterior of a Dietrich character hides a mass of contradictory emotions, but her apparent heartlessness is usually revealed as a defensive pose. The big character surprise is often that she’s less in control of herself than she thinks.

Some of the sparse dialogue in Morocco is practically hard-boiled, with Amy telling Gary Cooper’s lively trooper Brown that women belong to an army too:

“There’s a foreign legion of women, too. But we have no uniforms, no flags, and no medals when we are brave; no wound stripes when we are hurt.”

Dietrich’s complex appeal comes off well, while Cooper shows an uncommon ease with his girl-bait Legionnaire character. Both are forever changing their minds and contemplating drastic romantic action. Menjou has a role that repeats in von Sternberg movies, the loser in love who doesn’t care that he’s being made a fool of. In this case his La Bessiere earns our respect.

Legionnaire Brown and the smitten La Bessiere play a civilized game of ‘Who does she love’ until Amy makes her near-absurd choice. The final image is well-rehearsed in stories of women and men in the exotic, erotic African desert, from Son of the Sheik to Gavin Lambert’s Another Sky.

Von Sternberg tells his story so directly that the romantic excesses don’t have time to become absurd. His feeling for light and space bathes the players in hazy Saharan sunlight, often burning through wooden lattices and coating Amy and Brown in hazy stripes. Top-billed Gary Cooper is given almost the same glamour accents as Dietrich; I think that his makeup includes lipstick. The absence of a musical score telling us how to react is a definite plus. So is the languid pace, that sometimes places long gaps between dialogue lines. Morocco does impressive things with stasis, and relative silence.

Both Dietrich and Greta Garbo made female spy movies in 1931, with Paramount’s Dishonored preceding MGM’s Mata Hari by eight months. Dietrich’s adventure in espionage is short and sweet, and her mission is almost an exercise in suicide. Ironic death hangs over the picture but our star puts a relaxed, amused face on much of the proceedings. Josef von Sternberg’s ability to sustain scenes where ‘little happens’ is remarkable. At two points in the movie we spend several minutes in a room watching someone rearrange coats, move a cat about, and uncover the truth about an enemy agent. This Dietrich/Sternberg picture has the least emphasis on scenic excess and atmospheric overkill.

World War One has begun. The Chief of the Austrian secret service (Gustav von Seyffertitz) needs a seductive secret agent to uncover a traitor in his organization. Pretending to be a foreign agent, he picks up Marie Kolverer, a streetwalker (Marlene Dietrich). Despite her low station Marie is a patriot, the widow of a fallen army officer. She passes the Chief’s clever loyalty test, is given the code name ‘X-27’ and dispatched to a fancy masked ball. There Marie arranges to go home with the target traitor, Colonel von Hindau (Warner Oland), and while he’s out of the room, finds the secret message that was passed to him by the grinning partygoer who shared their cab and tried to steal her away. Marie then goes after the other man, who turns out to be the Russian Colonel Kranau (Victor McLaglen). They ‘meet’ at a gambling parlor; he breaks away but later on steals into her house and discovers her identity. Marie is impressed with Kranau’s good manners under pressure, and he is smitten by her unshakable composure. Kranau escapes but Marie immediately follows him to a Russian town near the Polish border, posing as a maid right in the Army headquarters. She learns the Russian battle plan but is caught trying to escape. Kranau’s private interrogation of X-27 is another meeting of like-minded mutual admiration: Marie is slated for a summary execution, yet remains courageous and nonchalant.

Thirty years before the spy craze of the 1960s, Dishonored expresses the most romantic myths about espionage. The show begins in a downpour, as Marie Kolverer watches another fallen woman, a suicide, being carried to the morgue. The spy Chief conducts chemical experiments in his offices, presumably to make new knockout potions. Our lady spy is chosen precisely for her ability to put men off guard. She has a broad death wish, and likes the idea of dying in the service of her country. Marie picks up one of her victims during a high-stakes card game. She adopts a full disguise to penetrate the enemy’s domain. And our lady spy even has her own ‘theme music,’ in a show without a conventional film score.

Of all of Dietrich’s characters, X-27 is the most mysterious. Marie is independent, insolent and unmoved by a man’s suicide in her presence. She flirts unashamedly with the young officer (Barry Norton) who escorts her on a long walk to the office of the Chief. The majority of Dietrich’s von Sternberg characters are hardbitten women softened by love. Marie also compromises herself in the name of an almost abstract Love, for an enemy she barely knows. She even arranges for him to think that his escape was an accident, and not her doing.

The final scenes are an inversion of the first — X-27 expresses a philosophical view of death, completely fools a professional man, and takes another long walk with the same young admiring officer. She’s emotionally self-contained: her secrets are her own — her accusers never know her motives, and she greets the finale with a radiant smile. Unlike Garbo, Dietrich rarely gushes with emotion. X-27 adheres to formalities and holds all of her feelings private, yet plays out an intensely romantic game.

Aha, but Marie does have an outlet for her hidden emotions — she re-directs them into music. At the piano she pounds out rhapsodic songs, mainly ‘Donauwellen’, which we know as ‘The Anniversary Waltz’. It’s her private dance-of-death theme music.

The show has no daylight scenes. The only break from interiors and night exteriors is a brief battle montage, lasting barely twenty seconds; it appears to include an outtake from the silent Wings. Von Sternberg’s visual control commands everything else; the slo-ow dissolves have us looking at curious superimposed images for seconds at a time. The big costume party is interestingly arranged as a vertical set of indoor balconies festooned with confetti. The finale takes place in a castle yard, in the snow. The office of the ‘Chief’ is at the end of a long and ornate formal palace hallway. We can’t help but think of Don Adams’ Maxwell Smart, navigating his own secret corridor to reach his own Chief.

Perhaps to serve notice on MGM that X-27 is not a clone of Mata Hari, the show gives Dietrich a comic scene in her disguise as a country maid in traditional clothing, knee-high boots and braided blonde hair. Playing dumb, X-27 remains silent with the officer that tries to seduce her (Lew Cody) but instead pops her eyes, covers her face with her skirts when she blushes and pulls faces like Stan Laurel. It’s a funny bit of clowning that I’ve seen nowhere else in Dietrich’s pictures. The other ‘clowning’ is the strange performance of Fox loan-out star Victor McLaglen, who recites his dialogue slowly, often through a toothy grimace. In the film’s first scenes we worry that the character is stricken with lockjaw. His stylized dialogue delivery appears to be a von Sternberg specialty, as he directs a number of his leading men to speak in a strange cadence.

Dishonored plays most everything else fairly straight, except perhaps some costumes that seem out of place for 1915. X-27 wears an elaborate caped getup for the party scene, with a black mask that hides most of her face, almost like RoboCop. She also dons leather flying gear for a couple of shots showing her departing for Russia. The bleak finale allows X-27 to turn the finish into a moment of self-expression: a piano is provided for her to play, and she dons her unofficial uniform, a dazzling black dress. Only Marlene Dietrich could get away with applying lipstick in those extreme conditions. I don’t see many outpourings of love for Dishonored the way that fans go for Morocco and The Scarlet Empress, but it holds a special place in the collection.

Shanghai Express is a likely candidate for the best of the American Dietrich-von Sternberg collaborations. For once the ‘exoticisms’ in the story are borne out by the setting, a crowded railway train plying its way through a Chinese civil war. While the Anglo passengers fuss and complain, the world outside the rail ‘teems’ with masses of humanity, and the visuals are jammed with market clutter, silk banners and commerce conducted by cart and by foot. The von Sternberg fantasy image of Inscrutable Asia is the vision that stuck in the cultural imagination; soldiers going to Vietnam likely expected the place to look like panels from the comics’ Terry and the Pirates.

The rail passengers are scandalized to learn that the notorious ‘Shanghai Lil,’ a woman of ill repute plying her trade on the China coast, is a fellow traveler with a questionable young Chinese woman, Hui Fei (star Anna May Wong). English Army doctor Captain Donald Harvey (Clive Brook of Cavalcade) is needed in Shanghai to perform a brain operation on the governor-general. Although he’s too self-contained to show it, Donald is shocked to learn that Lily is actually his former lover, Madeleine. Donald bitterly rejects Lily, and she’s too proud to throw herself at him. Eurasian passenger Henry Chang (Warner Oland) eventually reveals himself to be a revolutionary general. When government troops arrest his top lieutenant, Chang’s rebel army halts the train while he negotiates the man’s return, using Donald as a hostage. The other passengers remain unaware of the personal sacrifices that Hui Fei and Lily make to insure their safe passage. Lily even agrees to go away with Chang as his lover, in a deal to keep the warlord from blinding Donald with a hot poker. She makes the preacher Carmichael (Lawrence Grant) promise not to reveal this. Will Captain Harvey realize how much Lily still loves him?

On the surface Shanghai Express recapitulates an old De Maupassant tale: an oppressed seamstress offers her body to a cruel Prussian officer to save a coach-load of fellow Frenchmen, only for her sacrifice to go unappreciated. Transposed into glossy romantic terms, Jules Furthman’s screenplay intensifies links between sex and devotion, torture and sacrifice. Portly passenger Eugene Pallette keeps remarking that they’ll all be lucky to reach Shanghai alive, what with the vagaries of the revolution. The other passengers remain mired in indignant post-colonial denial. Lily, Hui Fei and Donald play out a grand passion play.

This being a pre-Code story, Lily is identified as a prostitute without further explanation. Camp interpretations of the film frequently imagine further entanglements, insisting that Lily and Hui Fei are also lovers, that Chang is bisexual and keen on Captain Harvey, etc.. But there’s plenty to work with in Express strictly on heterosexual terms.

The best thing about the show is the prominent role give Anna May Wong, a veritable ethnic superstar in productions here and in England, whose career was diminished by the Production Code’s insistence that minorities be marginalized. Hui Fei is as much a mystery as Lily — fiercely independent, she’s the only passenger with the courage and determination to strike back at Chang. The icing on the cake is that the story allows a righteous murderer to walk away untouched at the climax. A post- enforcement Code movie would blame Hui Fei for the crimes of being sexually active, Chinese, and a woman. I should imagine that Hui Fei would be canonized by the #MeToo movement.

The Lily-Donald relationship is stylized quite strangely. When Lily is under pressure, Marlene Dietrich is often directed to simply twitch her eyes and move her chin nervously, like an attractive animal in a cage. It’s certainly better than redundant dialogue would be. On the other hand, in one early scene Lily delivers a long expository speech, an explicit recap of how she mistakenly drove Donald away and then regretted it for five long years. Lily is so interesting that we don’t mind — she’s simply explicating the meaning behind her carefully chosen tease line:

“It took more than one man to give me the name Shanghai Lily.”

Clive Brook recites most of his lines in a slow, grave manner, as if his mind were engaged in mulling over his love/hate relationship with Lily. Even when being nonchalant, Donald speaks in slow motion. He’s so deliberate that we’re surprised when he slugs an enemy soldier, instead of just standing and brooding over the situation. The romantic impasse is much like the Joan Crawford-Sterling Hayden emotional conflict in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, a traumatic breach of trust and selfish jealousy. In a post- Code enforcement picture, Lily would be a dull woman condemned for a simple indiscretion, or shady past relationship. And Captain Harvey would have to shun Lily because a doctor can’t be seen with ‘that kind of woman,’ even if her sins are only rumors. Yes, pre-Code pictures often had themes involving immorality, but they weren’t consistently hypocritical and dishonest.

Von Sternberg pulls off numerous impressive trucking shots through all of those packed sets. One desert location (Barstow?) was used for some establishing shots of a train, but the claustrophobic studio sets drip with atmosphere. Dietrich wears a couple of extravagant dresses, with feathers, etc., but the most impressive image simply shows her face re-sculpted by an overhead light. Critics of yesteryear expressed movie rapture over images of Lily’s face obscured by cigarette smoke. Shanghai Express is surely the height of the Dietrich All Glamour, All The Time period.

I took notes from a discussion board, where was posted an explanation for a jump cut that occurs during an interrogation scene in Shanghai, when Lily interprets for Major Lenard, a French officer. * Paramount voluntarily Cut Out some dialogue to appease the French Embassy, which placed a premium on military honor:

CHANG: Explain to him if he does not tell the truth I’ll have him shot.
LILY to LENARD (in French): He says if you don’t tell the truth he will have you shot.
LENARD (In French): When I was in the army I committed a minor offense and I was discharged.
LILY: He has been discharged for a minor offense.
CHANG: Then why does he wear that uniform?
LILY: Why do you wear that uniform then?
LENARD: I’m going to see my sister and I don’t want her to know I’ve been discharged.

Can we assume that James Cagney’s musical number ‘Shanghai Lil’ in the next year’s Footlight Parade is a reference to this movie?

The ornate, fun and somewhat silly Blonde Venus is an exercise in fantasy exoticism. Dietrich’s playing of her character barely makes sense beyond whatever near-absurd set piece happens to be on the screen. No ‘woman’s journey’ ever set up such a simplistic contrast between maternal and erotic instincts. One main compensation is a scene where Dietrich enacts the role of a simple housewife and mother. She’s sexier bathing her baby boy than when cavorting through von Sternberg’s notion of erotic nightclub acts.

German entertainer Helen marries Ned Faraday (Herbert Marshall), an impoverished researcher in New York. They’re happy with their little boy Johnny (Dickie Moore) until Ned needs 1500 dollars to go to Europe for a cure for radiation poisoning. To get the cash Helen goes on the stage as Helen Jones. She meets the rich playboy Nick Townsend (Cary Grant) and spends quite a bit of time with him; he advances her money to send Ned off right away. While Ned is away being de-irradiated Helen and Nick conduct an affair. Ned discovers this when he returns early from his cure, and threatens to take Johnny away. That’s when Helen goes on the run with the boy.

Dietrich’s many changes of heart and romantic allegiance in this dazzler are neither sufficiently explained or acted. Her dedication to her family doesn’t fit with her willingness to take up with Nick Townsend. Her fiery love life works on the assumption that women in show biz simply cannot stay faithful to one man. At first the perfect mommy, she becomes the sacrificing female, the scorned hussy, the fallen floozy, the triumphant star and finally the hopeful woman who wants her family back. Herbert Marshall’s Ned grumbles and fusses bitterly through most of the picture, diminishing our sympathy for him. Cary Grant’s one-note playboy isn’t all that great either; its surprising to see how limited his acting range is under von Sternberg’s all-controlling direction. When the circumstances require a sensitive reaction Dietrich is directed to do her ‘indecisive nervous twitching’ act.

The story is a stack of visually arresting scenes that appealed to von Sternberg. The movie begins with a delightful ‘water fairy’ scene in which Dietrich is one of six nymphs that catch the eye of some students on a walking tour. Lee Garmes lays on the gauze and the nude maidens (this is still the pre-Code era) frolic in double-exposures through hanging foliage. We’re told that this entire opening sequence was censored in some localities, well as in some countries overseas.

The Faraday household is a domestic paradise, with mommy Helen singing German nursery rhymes to little Dickie Moore. He’s barely more than a toddler yet this is his 30th film; he later appeared as a teenager in Out of the Past. Dad fumbles with his deadly isotopes in another part of the house. The business about getting cured for radiation overexposure is a real hoot; I’m sure the characters of On the Beach would have been interested in learning about the treatment.

Helen’s scandalous stage performance ‘Hot Voodoo’ is practically the working model for the gender-twisting definition of Camp. Six months before King Kong, The Blonde Venus makes her entrance in a hulking gorilla suit, complete with the icky, Stroheim- like detail of dripping nostrils. Performing a simian striptease, she reveals herself as a cannibal queen in a blonde Afro.

‘Hot voodoo, black as mud / Hot voodoo, in my blood

That African tempo, has made a slave.’

Only Jane Fonda went farther when she stripped off a bulky spacesuit in Barbarella. What Dietrich lacks in singing versatility she makes up in personality — whether in English, French or German, most of her deep-voiced lyrics really seem to say, ‘This way to the bedroom.’

Blonde Venus’s chaotic continuity is held together by a surfeit of stock shots of trains, boats and other ‘traveling montage’ devices. Von Sternberg delights in showing Dietrich drunk and disorderly in steamy flophouses. Helen plays a trick on Sidney Toler’s flatfoot by pretending to be a prostitute. Since so much of the movie is vague suggestion, for all we know von Sternberg is saying that she is a prostitute. Yet the movie engages because (sigh) Dietrich is just so dreamy. We don’t care what kind of martyred fallen woman she is supposed to be, and if she wants to hug the baby boy as a gentle hausfrau und mutter, that’s fine too.

Along the way we get good bits from Clarence Muse, Sterling Holloway and Hattie McDaniel. Robert Emmett O’Connor from The Public Enemy is a jaded nightclub manager.

There was once an associate film professor at UCLA named Robert Epstein who ran wonderful screening classes. To show us smug students how little we knew little about life, he showed us movies like International House to prove that sex and drugs were not inventions of our generation. When Epstein screened The Scarlet Empress in an original nitrate print from the brand-new UCLA Film Archive, we saw photographic artistry far beyond what was showing down the hill in Westwood. We also saw proof that early ’30s offered content a lot more interesting than Shirley Temple. Jules Furthman’s screenplay is a burlesque of stuffy historical melodramas, and revels in ribald sexual innuendo.

Cue images of royal crests and marching banners. Polish Sophia Frederica (Marlene Dietrich) is chosen by Russia’s Empress Elizabeth (Louise Dresser) to become the wife of Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe) and produce an heir to the throne. An imported bride is needed because Peter is a perverse idiot who plays with toy soldiers. Frederica, now known as Catherine, is strongly attracted to Count Alexei (John Lodge), Elizabeth’s current favorite. Life at court is confusing. The tyrannical Elizabeth demands that Peter should be in bed with his wife assuring the continuity of the monarchy, but the grinning madman instead indulges in bizarre games with his favorite courtesan – playmate. As soon as Catherine learns the ropes at court, she proves a master at power games both political and sexual.

A stylized, near-comic historical fantasy, The Scarlet Empress delivers a jolt from its very beginning. With all the trappings of a massive, sober epic, its script wastes no time in sending up the costume genre. Young Frederica (played by Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Sieber) is examined by a doctor who takes his leave as if imitating Groucho Marx. He am-scrays stage left, mumbling his exit line: “Now I’m off to perform another one of my operations.”

No sooner is Frederica pronounced healthy than an Uncle (Edward Van Sloan, no less) tells her bedtime stories about depraved tortures, which are depicted in a technically advanced page-turning optical montage sequence decorated with nude female victims. Such license was rare before the Production Code arrived and is simply amazing here. When Frederica grows up, Russian beefcake emissary John Lodge arrives to take her to Moscow. He delivers every line as von Sternberg had instructed Victor McLaglen, as a monotone sneer through half-clenched teeth, usually while leering at Dietrich. For her part, Dietrich plays the first section of the film in mouth-open awe, astonished by every outrageous event she witnesses.

We’re equally astonished by von Sternberg and designer Hans Dreier’s vision of Empress Elizabeth’s courtrooms, some of the most original and weird sets ever constructed. Everything is massively oversized. The doors to Catherine’s room are so heavy, eight women are required to open them. Made from rough logs, the palace is covered with religious icons. Oversized carved wooden figures of old men (saints?) are part of every piece of decor — chairs, staircases, etc. There is hardly a close-up of a character that doesn’t share the frame with a giant gnarled hand or twisted wooden face. It’s as if the drama were being played out amid a castle crowded with petrified ancestors. Most of the statues hold candles, which in addition to the dozens of other candles in view at any given time, give the whole movie a congested, oppressive quality.

This is Josef von Sternberg at his most baroque and Marlene Dietrich in her most sylized, minimized role. Transformed by Bert Glennon’s camera into a vision of desire, Dietrich’s face is always framed with glittering jewels or abstracted by veils or other softening devices. One closeup during her wedding to Sam Jaffe drew applause from us jaded film students … it is unlikely that any woman in film history has had as much glamour lavished on her visage.

The freakish joker leading Sternberg’s parade of perversity is Sam Jaffe’s Peter, played with wild eyes and a skull-like grimace. His activities are beyond bizarre. Peter marches real soldiers around the palace as if they were full-sized toys. Hissing his dialogue lines, he bores holes in the log walls with a giant drill (an anachronism?). The first inkling of Catherine’s rebellion is her natural willingness to disobey her new Empress and avoid this reptile.

The Production Code had taken effect several months before the release of The Scarlet Empress. Mae West’s films were severely sanitized but The Scarlet Empress must have been given a free pass, for the sheer volume of adulterous seduction on view is staggering. The ribald dialogue has some real zingers. Empress Catherine catches Peter’s concubine running around after him cleaning up the toy soldiers he’s left behind, and warns the woman to make herself scarce: “You’ve been picking up soldiers around here long enough!” A lady-in-waiting advises Catherine that every woman in court has a lover, including Elizabeth, and Catherine soon learns that Sex is Power. The scene where it is implied that she’s bought the loyalty of the Army with sexual favors is potent stuff. Couple the innuendo with the sensual decor, and this is one of the most delirious films ever made.

The last Dietrich-von Sternberg collaboration is a fanciful adaptation of a scandalous book that ended up being made into several sexy European films, among them Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. The age- old story posits the female of the species as a cruel manipulator of over-eager males. Depending on one’s viewpoint, it’s either an accurate measure of female perfidy, or the most misogynist story ever written. Von Sternberg’s version is not the most perverse, and it opts for a sentimental ending. But we immediately sympathize with whatever hapless male happens to be skewered on Ms. Dietrich’s amorous hook.

This time out the director’s motivation must have been the creation of a Spanish- flavored visual fantasia: it’s 1900, but some of the ornate costumes and stylized situations are a better fit for a hundred years earlier. Captain Don Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill) meets the coquettish, predatory Concha Perez (Marlene Dietrich). She proceeds systematically to flimflam, fleece and humiliate him. Conchita flouts her power over her victim. She even makes it known that she has other lovers, including the bullfighter Morenito (Don Alvarado). Don Pasqual is eventually forced to resign his commission over the scandal. He meets handsome Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero) at Carnaval and warns the younger man away from Concha… advice that Antonio doesn’t take to heart.

In any other hands the The Devil Is a Woman might become a one-joke farce, but von Sternberg’s direction and the earnest playing of Cesar Romero and Lionel Atwill (one of his best performances) make it into a bold story of male frustration. Edward Everett Horton’s semi-comic Governor serves a serious purpose as well. The operative theme seems to be that irresistible women are irresistible, and when they know it they can get away with anything. As in the other versions Concha Perez allows her suitors to shower her with money and gifts, under the mistaken assumption that they are buying special favors. They are then stupefied when she flaunts another lover in their faces. By not giving in Concha both maintains her self-respect and demonstrates her power. Being able to luxuriate in willfully wicked feminine caprichos is an added bonus.

After the previous year’s The Scarlet Empress failed to scale the box office heights, grandiose opulence was apparently out of reach for this last Dietrich-von Sternberg collabortion. The Devil Is a Woman achieves its atmospheric visuals on a smaller scale, yet the Spanish settings are suitably ornate. Featuring boldly are plenty of those wrought iron gates that figure so strongly in the other versions of the story.

Dietrich’s costumes are as impressive as ever. Despite being as Spanish as peach strudel, she’s a knockout in the lace-and-mantilla Spanish dresses. Dietrich says one accented word (‘Sevilla’) and is content to bat her Teutonic eyes from behind a fan.

Von Sternberg’s ornate erotic fantasies made him a darling of surrealists, and this movie makes use of an impressively advanced flashback structure. As Atwill tells his story to Romero, we keep bouncing back to new episodes from the past. Transitions between the past and the present use no ‘wavy glass’ oil dissolves, only simple straight cuts. Audio cues sometimes precede the cut. It looks and plays like something from at least the 1960s, and it’s possible that audiences in 1935 had difficulty following the continuity.

Devil didn’t make a pile of money either. Von Sternberg decided not to work with Dietrich again, which according to biographer Homer Dickens didn’t sit well with his leading lady. The director was also possibly jealous of the attention given Dietrich’s contribution to the films. Dietrich immediately went on to work for other top directors — Frank Borzage, Ernst Lubitsch — often dictating her own lighting as learned from her mentor. Von Sternberg was not generous with creative credits. He lit his own pictures and sometimes omitted credits for other cameraman (like Lucien Ballard) along with some art directors.

The common reason given for the decline of Marlene Dietrich’s pictures is that her brand of exotic erotica fell out of tune with the mood of the country. Audiences were rejecting exotic females with breathy foreign accents. A major exhibitor labeled Dietrich, Crawford and Hepburn ‘box office poison’ in 1937, starting a critical backlash that threatened all of their careers. Hepburn retreated momentarily to the stage and Crawford lost what little pull she had for choice roles at MGM. After being booted from the ‘jinx picture’ Hotel Imperial Dietrich made movies with David O. Selznick and Alexander Korda (Knight Without Armour). She sat out a full year before bouncing back strongly in 1939’s comedy western Destry Rides Again. Her solution to win back her audience was to spoof her previous imperious image as a sultry siren. Going forward, her greatest hits would include an element of comedy.

The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray of Dietrich & von Sternberg in Hollywood does right by these 85 year-old classics, reviving them with new scans and meticulous clean-up. Paramount films of the 1930s have been a worrisome problem for some time. With the entire collection sold to MCA in the 1950s (what were they thinking?) most features were protected with only one or two safety fine-grains, and everything else thrown out. This means that alternate versions with scenes censored by the Production Code office were simply lost. In many cases small censorship changes (like the snippet cut from Shanghai Express) became permanent. The perfect nitrate prints screened at UCLA in the early 1970s misled many of us to think that the films would always be available in pristine condition, a notion that has been proven wrong many times: what remains of Paramount’s 1932 Island of Lost Souls can’t compare to what we screened at UCLA.

We’ve therefore been wary of what can be done with the Dietrich pictures — even on DVD, many 1930s Paramounts are available only in marginal quality, even some of the Marx Brothers comedies. For the most part the new transfers are a very happy surprise. Criterion’s notes say that Morocco was given a new 2K transfer, while Dishonored, Blonde Venus and The Scarlet Empress were transferred in 4K from positive prints held by UCLA. A dupe negative of The Devil is a Woman received its own 4K scan. Shanghai Express isn’t mentioned so I assume an earlier Universal master was used.

The good news is that five of the six films look great, with no complaints. An occasional shot might pop up with a problem, but the softness of earlier DVDs is mostly gone. The digital cleanup erases most blemishes. Those amazing close-ups in Scarlet Empress now do more than just approximate the luster of original prints. Von Sternberg’s frequent lengthy lap dissolves are mostly silky-smooth, with no dip to a lower image quality. The Paramount logo for Blonde Venus simply cuts on; it’s possible that someone later removed an NRA title card that preceded it.

I’m guessing that the problem with Morocco is the lack of a good transfer source. The image is appreciably softer and lighter than the other five pictures. I would imagine that some of the websites specializing in fine image analysis might be critical of the other presentations as well, but I’m more than pleased. I really was expecting them all to have serious issues. Von Sternberg’s films rely on high-quality images to be properly appreciated, and the old Scarlet Empress DVD was a rare Criterion disc that simply didn’t look good. This remaster makes amends.

As with the best Criterion extras, everything included on the six discs has its reason and makes its statement. On the first two discs, thoughtful and well-illustrated featurettes chart Dietrich’s early life and career, and the power of her carefully crafted screen image. A German archivist shows us through an enormous collection of Dietrich’s personal possessions, and briefly tells the story of the real woman on whom Morocco’s Amy Jolly was based. Other extras go into Dietrich’s fashions; she also appears in color on Danish television, in 1971.

An eighty-page illustrated book carries excellent essays by Imogen Sara Smith, Gary Giddins, and Farran Smith Nehme. They examine clues as to authorship of the films, and report specifics of the seven-film collaboration. Marlene Dietrich was far too strong a personality to be passively controlled by anyone, yet made herself an eager object for von Sternberg’s artistic impulses.

David Hare: Thanks for the cracking review Glenn. On the subject of Shanghai Express and the dialogue cut, I am still not convinced your correspondent’s explanation for the cut being made by Paramount at the behest of the French government in 1932 is correct. I am now relying on personal memory verging on ancient history but I distinctly recall the missing dialogue in many, many screenings dating back to 1968 in Sydney at an almost complete retro of Jo’s work at both the Sydney Uni Film group and the then NFT, at the latter of which the 35mm nitrate prints on loan from MOMA and UCLA were screened. I recall the print being uncut, although the then- current print of Blonde Venus was far more heavily cut, with the opening ‘German glade’ sequence of approx 4 minutes which was removed cutting the film sharply from the credits to the boat sailing into the Hudson River, cutting sharply again to Dickie Moore in the bathtub. This was how it presented in its MCA television print form. I only first saw a complete print of this ten years later in Paris, at one of the then- regular Sternberg-Dietrich festivals that adorned one or other of the left bank cinemas. Shanghai Express was also playing in ’78 and was again uncut. And in France! The missing dialogue quoted is from page 100 of a UK publication of the screenplays (in fact the continuity scripts) for Morocco and Shanghai Express published in 1973. The book’s texts were drawn from prints supplied from both the BFI and the BBC (who regularly screened the cycle in its own 35mm on BBC2). The other source was continuity scripts provided by Universal. I think unless we have some corroborating statement from Universal itself that the cut in the Shanghai Express interview sequence was made by them for the reasons stated it is in fact what I would consider a ‘rogue’ cut which was made sometime between what I would call roughly 1978 and 1994 when the first videos, including laser, VHS and DVD were released of the title all sporting the cut. My own impression is that given the rough, jagged state of the emulsion and the print physically in the few seconds leading up to the cut it was done mindlessly by some staff in the Archive to clean the print up without any attempt to find dupe footage to replace the (longer, ca. 40 second) shot. Perhaps your correspondent could provide further material to support the ‘censorship appeasement’ theory?

7.01.18:

James Steffen: Agreed Glenn and David, this a really thoughtful and detailed review of the set. I can’t wait to receive my copy! Regarding the missing dialogue, I checked the film’s Production Code Administration file, and there is in fact a memo from September 16, 1932 noting that France requested a number of deletions, including the full dialogue exchange in question. This was, however, several months after the film’s February 1932 release in the U.S.. So audiences here would have seen the film uncut. David could very well be right about uncut prints of the film circulating until the last couple of decades, but who knows what has happened to those prints since then?

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Dietrich & von Sternberg in HollywoodBlu-rayrates:
Movies: Excellent
Video: Morocco: Good -minus/ Fair +plus; the other five Very Good / Excellent
Sound: Very Good / Excellent
Supplements (re: Criterion): New interviews with film scholars Janet Bergstrom and Homay King; director Josef von Sternberg’s son Nicholas; Deutsche Kinemathek curator Silke Ronneburg; and costume designer and historian Deborah Nadoolman Landis. New documentary about actor Marlene Dietrich’s German origins, featuring film scholars Gerd Gemünden and Noah Isenberg; New documentary on Dietrich’s status as a feminist icon, featuring film scholars Mary Desjardins, Amy Lawrence, and Patricia White; The Legionnaire and the Lady, a 1936 Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of Morocco featuring Dietrich and actor Clark Gable; New video essay by critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin; The Fashion Side of Hollywood, a 1935 publicity short featuring Dietrich and costume designer Travis Banton; Television interview with Dietrich from 1971. Plus, and 80-page illustrated book featuring essays by critics Imogen Sara Smith, Gary Giddins, and Farran Smith Nehme.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Six discs in card and plastic folders with book in card box
Reviewed: June 28, 2018(5764diet)

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/dietrich-von-sternberg-in-hollywood/feed/3https://trailersfromhell.com/dietrich-von-sternberg-in-hollywood/Take a Girl Like Youhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/puLD5VbIiQU/
https://trailersfromhell.com/take-a-girl-like-you/#commentsSat, 30 Jun 2018 17:54:32 +0000https://trailersfromhell.com/?p=34236 It’s a Brit sex comedy that addresses the basic facts about boy-girl petting — and not much else. A noted ‘adult’ role for Hayley Mills, it pairs her with an unlikable Oliver Reed, trying his damnedest to affect natural charm. Was Reed the reason Hayley chose as her next picture a story about a...

It’s a Brit sex comedy that addresses the basic facts about boy-girl petting — and not much else. A noted ‘adult’ role for Hayley Mills, it pairs her with an unlikable Oliver Reed, trying his damnedest to affect natural charm. Was Reed the reason Hayley chose as her next picture a story about a lady studying penguins?

Wait a minute — when exactly did they finally stop calling young women, ‘birds?’

When the Hollywood studios all but collapsed at the end of the 1960s, the British Film Industry took a major hit as well. No more Yankee dollars pouring in curtailed production, especially of big-ticket productions with international appeal. Hammer Films suddenly had difficulty securing American distribution. With the loosening of censorship, industry veterans took whatever jobs could be found.

1970’s Columbia co-production Take a Girl Like You is a with-it sex comedy-drama made mostly by TV people. It’s the only feature directing credit for Jonathan Miller, who mostly specialized in classics for the telly — but also was heavily involved writing and performing on Beyond the Fringe, the comedy show with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Screenwriter George Melly had written Desmond Davis’s Smashing Time (1967) and little else. He adapted the novel by Kingsley Amis, a respected literary figure.

Try as she might, the talented child star Hayley Mills didn’t translate well to adult roles, probably because of her wholesome image. The ratings system coarsened the average run of pictures available for actors, and actresses like Susannah York and Hayley’s own sister Juliet went with the flow. It’s likely that Mills just felt more comfortable backing off.

Take a Girl Like You posits Hayley Mills in a much different world than her teenage picture Summer Magic. The virginal Northern schoolteacher Jenny Bunn (Mills) comes to a small provincial town and is immediately swept up in the petty issues of the Thompson boarding house. Her new landlord Dick Thompson (John Bird) is an obnoxious lecher; after a night of drinking he all but tries to rape Jenny. Dick’s fed-up wife Martha (Sheila Hancock) dismisses his awful behavior as business as usual; she has her hands full with his political run for local office for the Labour Party. Jenny is immediately pursued by Patrick Standish (Oliver Reed), a graphic arts teacher who is already sleeping with another of the Thompson’s tenants, Anna (Geraldine Sherman). Going to parties with the awkward Scot Graham (Ronald Lacey) and the wealthy landholder Julian Ormerod (Noel Harrison), Jenny is confused by the general setup, sexually speaking. Although Graham is too square to score, Patrick and Julian play the field with casual conquests, including the oversexed, birdbrained Wendy (Aimi MacDonald). Patrick rudely puts the moves on Jenny, trying to get her into bed on their first date and then sneaking her away from various functions without asking her first. When she doesn’t put out Patrick becomes personally offended. The consensus attitude seems to be that Jenny is making too big a deal about sex, that it’s her problem. After a number of unpleasant encounters, she makes a hard date with Patrick to ‘lose her virginity,’ only to balk when she finds that Patrick has announced it to Julian. They’ll take a girl like her, no question of it.

Despite its title Take a Girl Like You isn’t a vulgar comedy, not in the Music-Hall sense of the Carry On series and not in the new ‘getting it off’ British sex comedies that existed only to display topless women. As the consumer-driven notion of Swinging London began to fade, sex farces like The Best House in London mostly fell dead flat. America had its share of tasteless sex comedies as well, from A Guide for the Married Man to the repressed (constipated, actually) The Impossible Years, and the majority of comic spy pictures. In 1971, the widely distributed English comedy Percy gave us the adventures of the recipient of a penis transplant (Hywel Bennett), as various women tried to get his new graft to function. Hayley Mills would star opposite Bennett several times, but not on that one.

As had Rita Tushingham several times in the previous decade, Mills’ Jenny enters the story as a provincial girl riding on public transport. Rita encountered wolves and cheats, but some of them were charming. The dispiriting thing about Take a Girl Like You is its refusal to engage with its own subject matter. Dating a wolf like Patrick means being subjected to a full court press of mauling and groping, which she clearly seems to be enjoying (breaking news: Pollyanna gets felt up). Yet she has to say ‘No’ every thirty seconds, as Patrick respects no boundaries.

The pattern is pathetic. Patrick acts innocent or petulant as needed, always promising to behave. When they’re alone he immediately jumps her, breaking every promise. There’s no chemistry, just assault, yet Patrick makes Jenny feel as if she’s the one who needs to apologize, for not being ‘with it.’ Is this a political analogy?

The situation isn’t helped by the casting of Oliver Reed, who punctuates his cute smiles with dark glowers that make us wonder how soon he’s going to start sprouting silver hair and fangs. There’s absolutely nothing to like in his character, even when the script makes Patrick the ‘victim’ of Wendy’s amorous advances. He’s supposed to be Anna’s boyfriend, but when she catches him wrestling with Wendy, or ditching her to sneak off to the woods with Jenny, Anna merely acts inconvenienced. Anna eventually becomes a supporting clown alongside Ronald Lacey’s ineffectual Graham, They’re left behind carrying the drunken Dick Thompson while Patrick sneaks off to canoodle with Jenny.

The one person Jenny opens up to is Noel Harrison’s thoroughly slimy Julian, a toff who owns a huge estate, drives a Pontiac Firebird and casually sleeps with whatever dolly bird ambles by. The message is the same — why are you ‘hung up’ on sex? Jenny is in dire need of someone sane and caring, who doesn’t devalue sex as something that has to be done to get on with one’s life, like getting a driver’s license. It’s truly unpleasant to see Jenny make her personal choices under these conditions.

Take a Girl Like You in no way connects with social realities, as did those thoughtful Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave pictures. No real context is shown for Jenny — her family is invisible and we never see her working as a teacher. We don’t know if Jenny is taking The Pill, the ’60s advance that made it possible for women to seek sexual equality. Don’t small towns everywhere have moral monitors looking out for potential gossip material? Jenny teaches small children, but nobody seems concerned that she’s attending parties with liquor and wild behavior. The freedom-lovers in Tushingham’s The Knack… and How to Get It! functioned under a constant shower of disapproval from old folk.

The story resolution may think that it offers an adult alternative to wishy-washy compromises of the past, but it’s wholly unsatisfactory. The women of the movie are uniformly treated like dirt, and Jenny’s decision feels like a total defeat, even if the final image tries to be ambiguous. After her frustrations in The Family Way, it’s as if Hayley Mills were being thrown to the wolves. She surely deserved more worthy film roles.

The explanation for this literally screwed-up picture comes from Kingley Amis’ source book, as reported by Twilight Time’s house scribe Julie Kirgo. The original Take a Girl Like You does take a more socially critical stance, and presents a harsher picture of Patrick Standish’s behavior as a believably selfish cad and dastard out for all he can get. It looks as if TV comedy writer George Melly simply wrote conflicting dialogue that pretends that Patrick is really a sincere fellow underneath it all. The result is that Patrick comes off as truly malignant.

A description given of a 2000 TV series remake of Take a Girl Like You indeed sounds more like something Kingsley Amis would write — its Jenny Bunn (Sienna Guillory) comes to work not in some quaint country burg, but a rough manor of North London. She loses her virginity Bill Cosby- style, by drinking too much at a party and simply being raped by Julian Ormerod.

In the Hayley Mills version it looks as if a serious story has been awkwardly adapted as a cute farce that assumes that ‘sweet young things’ in miniskirts are flowers to be plucked by bad boys with privileges. The film’s advertising tagline reads In this day and age, what’s a virgin to do? One piece of selected poster art shows Jenny holding her hands in front of herself, defending her … do you need me to draw you a picture?

We suspect that characters written as harsh have been performed and directed in a softer manner. With his showcase house, slick car and mod turtlenecks, Noel Harrison’s Julian has all the female company he wants without making the slightest effort. All smiles and glib niceties, the character is at heart a pretentious creep. He supports Dick Thompson’s run for office because he wants his property safe from incursion by a proposed airport. It is also arguable that Julian’s interaction with Jenny at the finale is a deliberate trap.

Julian is so studiously effete that many will interpret him as gay, even with his constant parade of dolly birds. He repeatedly tells Wendy to ‘shut up,’ but that’s not half as offensive as his eye-rolling reaction to a walk-through by a swishy gay character. The other characters are woefully underdeveloped. Sheila Hancock’s suffering wife should be sympathetic but isn’t, and Ronald Lacey’s Graham has insufficient self-esteem to earn our respect. And frankly, the way Jenny caves in to the stealth predator Julian and the deceitful lout Patrick, we lose respect for her as well. She shouldn’t have to deal with any of these people. If this were a John Milius movie, Jenny Bunn could take a bus to a pay phone a safe distance away and call in an air strike to wipe the town off the map.

Do English viewers more familiar with this cast perceive these characters differently? Looking at the IMDB, the completely unfamiliar John Bird appears to be a major TV star, as is Sheila Hancock. Aimi MacDonald, Imogen Hassall (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) and Pippa Steel (The Vampire Lovers) receive mostly glamour walk ons, but may be familiar to genre fans. Ronald Lacey is surely best known for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Noel Harrison had a long career acting and singing, after starring in The Girl from Uncle.

The Twilight Time Blu-ray of Take a Girl Like You is a handsome encoding of this bright and colorful excursion into sexually-active frustration. Dick Bush’s cinematography helps Ms. Mills look fresh and cheerful without gimmicks; the pleasant greenery around town gives the randy characters plenty of attractive places to irritate each other. Even Patrick’s cute little convertible (a Morris Minor) is attractive. Don’t judge by the grab-bag of images found for this review, as the Blu-ray looks far better.

Presented in TT’s welcome Isolated Music menu choice, Stanley Myers’ bouncy soundtrack pretends that what we’re seeing is light and breezy. The title song by The Foundations won’t remind you of that band’s big (bubblegum?) hit “Build Me Up Buttercup.” What Hayley Mills fans really need are glorious remastered discs of her Tiger Bay and Whistle Down the Wind.

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/take-a-girl-like-you/feed/4https://trailersfromhell.com/take-a-girl-like-you/For a Few Dollars Morehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/AnHTJMzNjRQ/
https://trailersfromhell.com/for-a-few-dollars-more/#respondFri, 29 Jun 2018 04:00:51 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=3497Sergio Leone’s more elaborate followup to A Fistful of Dollars became one of the seminal Euro westerns, turning the Man with No Name series into a Bond-like tentpole for distributor United Artists and cementing Clint Eastwood’s international stardom. That unforgettable Ennio Morricone score ain’t bad either!

]]>Sergio Leone’s more elaborate followup to A Fistful of Dollars became one of the seminal Euro westerns, turning the Man with No Name series into a Bond-like tentpole for distributor United Artists and cementing Clint Eastwood’s international stardom. That unforgettable Ennio Morricone score ain’t bad either!

]]>https://trailersfromhell.com/for-a-few-dollars-more/feed/0https://trailersfromhell.com/for-a-few-dollars-more/Land Raidershttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trailers_from_hell/~3/bG2Ij5bEhoQ/
https://trailersfromhell.com/land-raiders/#commentsWed, 27 Jun 2018 04:00:48 +0000http://trailers.wpengine.com/?p=4721Like some other gurus, Brian Trenchard-Smith got his start in the movie biz by cutting trailers. Here he wryly dissects his own work on the jazzed-up trailer for a middling Euro Western sporting arguably the greatest action score by Morricone collaborator Bruno Nicolai.

]]>Like some other gurus, Brian Trenchard-Smith got his start in the movie biz by cutting trailers. Here he wryly dissects his own work on the jazzed-up trailer for a middling Euro Western sporting arguably the greatest action score by Morricone collaborator Bruno Nicolai.